A solid system that has withstood covid, inflation and high energy prices

In this decade, Italy's production system has shown excellent resilience; despite the Covid, the two-year period 2022-23 with inflation at 7-8%, the energy crisis (still only dormant), and some structural limits that are far from being resolved, not only has it not regressed, but in some respects it has strengthened. This is what Unioncamere data on business demographics in the period 2016-25 says.

At the end of last year, the total number of active enterprises was above 5.8 million; a figure essentially unchanged from the previous two years and only 3% lower than in 2020 and also 2016. Every year, new business start-ups have always been well above 300,000 (except, of course, in 2020) and in the last two years they exceeded 320,000. Both as an absolute value and as a proportion of the stock of enterprises (just under 6%), this figure confirms the persistence in Italia of a remarkable rate of entrepreneurship, which favours the continuous renewal of the fabric of companies within a private enterprise system of almost 6 million businesses; more than one for every ten inhabitants!

And the way this structural stock of companies has evolved is the other evidence of its strengthening. Corporations increased by 24 per cent; Partnerships decreased by 23 per cent and sole proprietorships by 10 per cent. Whereas in 2016, the latter were more than double the former, today they are only 40 per cent higher. In recent years, the system has become much more robust: today, around one third of companies are corporations with their own legal personality, dedicated invested capital and defined governance; ten years ago, only a quarter of companies had these characteristics.

This strengthening is reflected in the evolution of employment, which in 2025 will reach around 19.5 million people, an increase of 15 per cent compared to 2016; moreover, 83 per cent of the employed are 'employees', compared to 77 per cent ten years ago. And employment is also increasingly concentrated in corporations, which, in 2025, accounted for 64 per cent of total employment, whereas in 2015, it was only 53 per cent

The evolution of the business system also affected its sectoral composition. In these ten years, the trend towards an increase in services (personal, business and in tourism) and a decrease in trade has continued. A mirror-image trend that shows how social and market phenomena initiated at the beginning of the century now have a very substantial reflection on the production system. The manufacturing sector has also undergone a contraction, mainly due to the considerable complexity factors that have affected it and that have led to an inevitable skimming off of companies, but not to the structural regression of the industry as a whole. Other data (OECD) in fact show that manufacturing Italy remains in second place in Europe in terms of employment, recording a certain recovery in both added value and gross investment in recent years.