Confindustria: 'Anaemic growth, manoeuvre moves Italy'. Orsini: 'Incentives expiring, a problem to compete'

 "I don't like to hear that companies are borrowers, or to companies anyway we are giving them," the leader of the industrialists went on to emphasise that the Single Zes' results were "win-win". "I hope, however, that those who are doing the math today for the country's growth will look at that chapter, because the real key is to understand that the Single Zes for what it has given as a model, is the way." Resources to support investment, 'simplification, certainty and a three-year vision. This is what is needed to relaunch the country, to get it above 1%' growth. And there remains the issue of the competitiveness gap linked to the cost of energy: returning from Madrid, after yesterday's summit with Spanish industrialists, 'where for a few days the cost of energy drops to zero,' Orsini clarified: 'Energy is part of competitiveness. To be competitive, energy must be paid for like in other countries'..

"The real issue," added Orsini, "is uncertainty. To defend ourselves, we must provide certainty. That is why we insist on an industrial plan with a three-year horizon, in order to have continuity of measures'. "Industry 4.0 expires, Transition 5.0, other incentive measures expire," and in the face of these deadlines "we have tried to make proposals - there are ongoing talks with the government - dividing companies by size, asking for measures for small and medium-sized companies - automatic measures such as Industry 4.0 - and for large ones, such as development contracts, which can be a way but not with the current rule: a preliminary investigation cannot last three years.

"A crucial role in accelerating investment can be played by the financial wealth of Italian households," notes the Confindustria Study Centre. "This wealth is growing rapidly and has reached enormous values, amounting to over EUR 6 trillion in 2024, fuelled primarily by the high savings of recent years. In particular, household bank deposits in Italy have reached over 1,500 billion, about a quarter of the total." For the economists of Viale dell'Astronomia, "mobilising even a small part of the total wealth of Italian households could free up huge resources to finance new productive investments in the country: for example, shifting just 1.0% from deposits to bonds and shares issued by Italian companies could translate into the financing of 15 billion new investments". For this, 'we need well-constructed policy measures that induce households and large financial intermediaries (such as pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds) to move resources towards instruments issued by our companies. It should be emphasised that these resources could also be usefully employed to finance infrastructures of national interest, investments in health and education, creating a more favourable environment for growth'..

The report explains that the annual dynamic of the economy is held back in particular by the setback in Q2 2025, when Italy's GDP declined by 0.1%, due to the fall in exports. The weak GDP dynamics, both in the average 2025 and in 2026, will be mainly supported by investments, to a lesser extent by household consumption, while net exports will contribute negatively.

The weakest component of demand in Italy is exports, the Report further points out. In the CsC scenario, the growth of exports of goods and services, already very weak in 2023-2024, will be close to zero in 2025-2026; in particular, sales of goods are expected to fall. Imports, on the other hand, will increase and, as a result, net exports will make a very negative contribution to the change in GDP.

The export profile is significantly revised downwards compared to April's report, due to the jump in US tariff barriers on European products and the increasing global geopolitical tensions. Italian goods exports are also losing ground compared to world trade, because demand in Europe (the main destination of Italian products) is still weak and because the strong euro penalises the competitiveness of products in the entire eurozone.

The outlook is not good, as European industrial activity is expected to recover only gradually and protectionist and geopolitical brakes appear to be lasting. On the positive side, the ratification of the EU-Mercosur agreement would open up important outlet markets, partially offsetting the barriers in the US market.

Conversely, the report highlights, the most robust demand component in Italy is fixed investment. After slowing down in 2024 (+0.5%), their dynamics have returned to strengthen between the end of last year and the first half of 2025. They are expected to remain expanding in the second half of this year (+3.0% on average) and slow down next year (+1.9%). In addition to benefiting from the no longer restrictive monetary policy, which will have a mitigated impact next year, investment - CsC points out - has been effectively stimulated by tax incentives. Those in residential construction, which fell in 2024 but are recovering this year, are being supported by Ecobonus and Bonus Ristrutturazioni, albeit depressed compared to the past; those in machinery and equipment and intangibles, by Transition 4.0 and, after the latest simplifications, also by Transition 5.0; the NRP is driving investment in non-residential buildings, a pull that will fade in 2026 due to the mid-year end of the Plan.

Employment continues to grow more than GDP in 2025 (+0.9 % ALUs, already largely achieved in Q2), but will slow down in 2026 (+0.5 %), favouring an initial recovery of labour productivity. Industry in the narrow sense, after a phenomenon of 'employment without growth' during the energy crisis and until the first half of 2025, is the sector where labour productivity is most compressed (-4.7% added value per hour worked in Q2 2025 compared to Q4 2019). In the forecasts of the Centro Studi Confindustria, the weak advance in industrial activity expected in the second half of the year will, however, be accompanied by substantial stability in labour input, which will grow at a more moderate pace than value added even in 2026. The construction sector, in stark contrast to the industrial sector, is characterised by large gains in labour productivity compared to pre-pandemic, expected to remain at high levels in the forecast scenario.

The dynamics of de facto per capita wages in the Italian economy as a whole accelerated to +2.9% in 2024 (from +1.8% in 2023) and to +3.1% in the first half of 2025, a pace at which it is expected to remain on average this year (+3.2%), to decelerate only slightly next year (+2.7%). Thanks to wage dynamics remaining above inflation, the slow recovery of real wages will continue, advancing by +2.3% cumulatively over the two-year period 2025-2026. The upswing started already in 2023, driven by the private sector, where real wages per AWU in Q2 2025 recovered almost 40% of the large loss in purchasing power generated by the energy crisis (-5.3% over Q1 2021, from a low of -8.5% in Q4 2022). In the public sector, which accounts for about a quarter of the total wage bill, real wages per capita fell even further with the price surge in 2022 and were still 9.4 percentage points lower in spring 2025.