The industrial system back on the public agenda

The difficulties in which the Italian industrial system finds itself, as witnessed by the almost uninterrupted downward trend in the industrial production index over the last two years, signal the real risk that the Italian economy is settling into a dangerous process of deindustrialisation. It is surprising that the political forces of majority and opposition are not paying due attention to this issue: the measures - including Industria 4.0 and Southern Italy Tax Credit - that in the final part of the 2013-18 parliamentary term kick-started a phase of investment recovery have subsequently clashed with hesitations on the refinancing side and with the burdening of authorisation procedures, as in the case of Transition 5.0, which have limited their effectiveness.

The election campaign for the regional elections must be an opportunity to put the issue back at the centre by urging the national government and parliament, which are responsible for the key directions and instruments of industrial policy, with a commitment to 'bottom-up' reindustrialisation as part of a new regional development policy. One of us (Buti with Casini Benvenuti and Petretto, Il Sole 24 Ore, 4 September) has promoted a Manifesto on the reindustrialisation of Tuscany that has triggered an extensive debate among the region's social, economic and cultural forces. Similar contributions are also emerging in other regions that will go to the vote in the coming weeks.

Re-industrialisation is not an end in itself but a key instrument to reconcile growth and fairness: it increases stable employment and wages; with the pressure of competition it erodes extra profits and rents, favouring a redistribution in favour of labour income and a reduction of inequalities; the reallocation of production factors towards manufacturing and service sectors with higher wages and higher productivity plays a key role in breaking out of the 'mature technology trap'.

In devising a strategy for reindustrialisation, it must be made clear what not to do. First, contrast manufacturing and the tertiary sector. If welfare services, such as schooling and healthcare, play an important upstream role in training and caring for human capital, a key role is played, in this case within manufacturing processes themselves, by so-called high value-added, skill- and digital technology-intensive services. Secondly, we must not feed a rejection reaction towards the green transition: sustainability does not only reflect an ethical-moral need, but supports a project of economic growth, where new materials, clean tech, and circular economy are the necessary basis of a new industrial development that innovates on both process and product. Thirdly, it makes no sense to focus on mere deregulation: we do not need an absence of rules, rather we need to take care of the market structure with pro-competitive regulation and simplification that clears the field of administrative superfetations and the paralysing effects of the NIMBY syndrome.

How to pursue this ambitious design? The Manifesto on Tuscany proposes a new partnership that starts with the social and institutional forces, but expands to include universities, research centres, and the excellence present in the regions, also involving the new entrepreneurs operating at the frontier of technology. The method can be generalised to other territorial realities. In the Mezzogiorno, it has a specific declination: it is a matter of leveraging the business realities that have taken shape over the last thirty years to give new impetus to the production fabric as a whole, thus picking up the thread of the industrialisation that was interrupted too early in the 1980s.