Governments change but Italy struggles to compete on the international stage

Around the world, Italy struggles to compete, governments, programmes and majorities change, but the conclusion is the same, we are at the bottom of the B ranking of competitiveness. Out of a total of 69 countries and on the basis of 330 parameters examined, the Swiss institute Imd placed Italy in 43rd place in 2025, one lower than 2024, which was one lower than 2023, which was equal to the 41st earned by Draghi, who had started from 44th covered for three years by the two Conte governments. In 2025, Italy was overtaken by Chile. The 30th place, albeit modest, that we boasted at the end of the 1990s is just a beautiful memory. Moreover, at that time Italy benefited from the freedom to make periodic competitive devaluations of the lira (that's what they were called) or rather, as a minister told me, the freedom to suffer them passively.

The OECD measures competitiveness by how many goods and services a nation can produce that are capable of facing international competition, to maintain and expand the real income of the population in the long run. It is a pity that no government has ever placed an improvement in the ranking at the centre of its legislative programme. Italy's public spending is very high but for the most part it does not aim at the prerequisites of competitiveness, it serves to alleviate the population's discomfort with compensatory measures (bonuses, refunds), welcome in the immediate term but unproductive in the long run. Let it be clear, the problem is not easy to solve. Just to say, in this ranking the United States in 2018 was still first in the world, but in 2020 it was rejected by the Chinese Covid and fell to tenth place. With Biden they dropped to 12th and this year with the second Trump they lost another position, despite everything we know. Perhaps he does not realise it but, when he invokes Make America Great Again, Trump ends up referring 'again' to the Obama era, as he himself was responsible for the loss of American competitiveness.

In addition to the international framework, a policy for competitiveness should be articulated in inter-ministerial implications, as many as the 330 parameters of the IMD. Such a complex policy should constitute the true industrial policy, capable of guaranteeing Italian-based companies the conditions to win in the world and thus respond to Confindustria. It should be headed by a committee of ministers led by the Prime Minister, a new Cipi based on the reasons that caused the abolition of the previous one in 1993. In that one, each minister fractioned and collectivised the responsibilities of his own department and in this way favoured pressure and favouritism. But that was the First Republic. Today, a qualitative and strategic upgrade is urgently needed.

The IMD groups the many subjects that make up competitiveness into four areas, each made up of five themes, a total of 20. To understand the causes of Italy's overall loss of two positions in this legislature, from 41st in 2022 to 43rd today, we calculated the improvement or deterioration in each of the 20 themes, also in relation to the starting position in the ranking. We thus discovered that in the area of government effectiveness, where we have always been at the bottom of the ranking, Italy has worsened further in public finance and fiscal policy (66th out of 69 countries), and improved in the social framework (31st) and institutional framework (34th). In other words, despite strikes and provocative tones in Parliament and in television debates, the overall picture has improved but public debt and taxes do not. In technological infrastructure we lag behind (48th). The domestic economy has worsened somewhat, wiping out the benefits of higher employment and better international openness in trade and investment. The worst situation appears to be in the corporate world, where deterioration in productivity, labour market, business management, and labour capacity have all added up.

There is no certain law of economic-institutional engineering in this science, but we have looked at Italy's ranking over the past thirty years and found that at the beginning of each government, competitiveness almost always improved and when it declined for objective reasons, the government of the day fell, perhaps ostensibly due to personal clashes between members of the majority (Bertinotti against Mastella, Tremonti against Fini, tomorrow Salvini against Tajani?). The ongoing drop in the competitiveness ranking, one position lost per year, should attract Giorgia Meloni's sensitive attention and suggest a resounding leap forward in the real economy.