Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was in difficulties internationally, but slow growth and a declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. This paper, using data from the Bank of Italy�s survey of manufacturers,...

After a quick profile of Italian foreign direct investments since 1900 and a short review of the main explanations of the lagged multinational growth by Italian manufacturing companies, a quick glimpse of business histories is given to the only two still today living "old protagonists" (Pirelli,...

This work presents, in a single framework, the results of several recent studies, carried out by Bank of Italy researchers, on the internationalization of the Italian productive system. The notion of internationalization is considered not only from the perspective of direct investments abroad...

This paper analyses the effect of competition from low-wage countries on domestic activity, using data on 230 Italian manufacturing sectors between 1995 and 2007. We find that low-wage import penetration is negatively related to employment and other measures of activity. The effect is...

The paper investigates R&D and ICT investment at firm level, assessing their relative importance and the extent to which they are complements or substitutes. We use data on a large unbalanced panel sample from four consecutive waves of a survey of Italian manufacturing firms, together with a...

In the last decade, and especially in the course of the recent global economic slowdown, the gap between southern and northern industry has widened. Industrial investment and employment decreased more sharply in the South than in the rest of Italy, and the contribution of the southern regions to...

I examine the effect of reducing export tariffs on the productivity of domestic suppliers of exporting firms. Using a panel of Chilean firms during a period of trade liberalization with the European Union, the United States, and the Republic of Korea, I show that the average reduction in the...

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D...

Italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms� productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor...

This paper investigates the markup of price over marginal cost in Italian manufacturing branches. The approach used is an extension of Hall's model that addresses some measurement shortcomings and theoretical limitations that may affect this class of model.