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Doing business in Italy

    • Meeting in digital format
    • 13 November 2020

          “Doing business” is a term that evokes complexity and challenge, especially when paired with “in Italy”, a country well known for its structural problems and irreconcilable contradictions: Structural problems consisting of a slow and chaotic bureaucracy, lack of legal certainty – due to repeated impulsive legislative modifications as well as to inconsistency and sluggishness in the judicial application of the law – and excessive difficulty accessing credit; irreconcilable contradictions in the form, first, of constant references to entrepreneurs as the drivers of economic recovery clash, with a legislative framework crying out for simplification and adequate incentive and investment policies; and secondly, repeated calls for instilling responsibility in young people, when no effective effort is then made to the fact that they themselves could well be a source of innovation and ideas.

          This situation is not a direct result of the recent Covid-19 crisis, which has only had the effect of increasing the urgency of revising the role of business in Italy and reinstate the entrepreneur as a pivotal factor in economic and social development. The Post-WWII era understood the importance of investing in business in order to facilitate the spread of collective prosperity and the greater protection of social rights. What seems to prevail today, on the other hand, are social welfare mechanisms that do not encourage long-term prosperity, but are limited – at times in the wake of emotional reaction – to “treating” the obvious symptoms without tackling the chronic malaise afflicting the country. Moreover, entrepreneurs are being asked to be resilient and accept the risks intrinsic to their activity, and the concept of failure as inherent to the very idea of doing business.   Finally, workers are expected, at least partly, to abandon the concept of securing a steady job, which only hinders the development of an adequately merit-based system.

          It is precisely the vision of long-term prosperity that demands that we invest in culture (only 27% of Italian people have a university degree). We must insist that the government act as regulator and arbiter of a free market based on certain rules, intervening where necessary as a driver of development in certain sectors of the economy, not least by financing spontaneous innovation. With the long term in mind, then, it would seem wise to adopt the motto “factories first, homes later” that inspired the post-Second World War economy.

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