Bankitalia alarm: little innovation, so Tuscany loses ground
Since the post-Covid phase, i.e. since 2021, Tuscany has been growing less than the Italian average, to mark a modest +0.4% of GDP in 2025 (+0.5% the Italian average). But the reasons are not only linked to demographics (so many elderly people, so few born) and 'poor' employment (more and more workers in the tourism and trade sectors, with low added value), but rather to low labour productivity: the average size of Tuscan companies is small and, above all, the weight of hi-tech is low in both manufacturing and services.
This is the picture described by the 2025 Report on the Tuscan economy drawn up by the Florentine branch of the Bank of Italy and presented on 8 June by director Vito Barone and the economists of the Analysis and Territorial Economic Research Division led by Giuseppe Albanese. "It is not just a question of the production structure," they explained, "in the region there is also a low patenting rate, a scarce contribution of spin-offs to the economy, and a difficulty in transforming more traditional sectors such as tourism and fashion. It is poor technological innovation that is Tuscany's insidious evil, the one that is progressively distancing it from the more dynamic regions of northern Italia and that risks - if there are no corrective measures - making it impoverished in terms of both wealth and human capital. "The gap with the central-northern regions is widening," Barone warned. "The participation of SMEs in hi-tech supply chains is too low," stressed Albanese.
The picture described by Bankitalia is alarming. The institute has added an 'extraordinary' chapter to its usual report on the economy precisely to try to give a key to understanding Tuscany's weaknesses, which are exacerbated by the fact that 22% of family businesses are controlled by people over 65, and are therefore little inclined to innovation and investment. The scarcity of private investment remains a generalised problem: loans to businesses are down 1%, with a more marked drop (-6.1%) for small companies. The deterioration rate remains low, as does the unemployment rate, but workers' skills are lower than the Italian average (and this is reflected in wages). The positive elements are that 90% of the companies surveyed on a sample basis by Bankitalia declared to have closed the 2025 budget in profit or at break-even, and that Tuscan exports continue to march (+20% in value in 2025) driven, however, by only two sectors, pharmaceuticals and gold bars, without which they would have a minus sign: pharmaceuticals have a negative trade balance due to the heavy import of active ingredients and raw materials, and bars leave a low added value in the territory.
If in 2025 Tuscany's poor growth was linked to industry (-2.7% turnover) and agriculture (-0.7% added value), with services remaining stable (+0.3% added value) and construction still showing positive dynamics (+3.7% production value), this year opened with great global uncertainties that make it difficult to make forecasts. Bankitalia's advice to politicians is to 'stimulate hi-tech sectors with risk capital and public intervention, without fragmenting contributions into a thousand pieces'.
