No. 196 - Italy’s system for supporting internationalization

This study analyses Italy's system for supporting internationalization, i.e. the set of public institutions and policies for promoting Italian businesses and products abroad. These policies are designed to overcome the barriers to operation in foreign markets, which may be distant in terms of culture and regulation and hard to access owing to legal and bureaucratic obstacles. The goal is to enhance the competitiveness of the Italian economy and ultimately put it back onto a growth path. The analysis has two parts: the examination of the institutional framework and the quantification of the public human and financial resources that are employed, thus providing an initial assessment of the performance of the system as a whole. Despite recent regulatory changes, the system is still quite complicated, with problems of coordination and overlapping among the different actors. Consequently the promotional system, while mobilizing considerable human and financial resources, even by comparison with Italy's main European partners, is lagging behind in its ability to encourage foreign establishment and exports of Italian companies.