The increase in the number of Italian companies listed on the stock exchange in the past 15 years has been considerable; however, the gap in terms of market capitalization-to-GDP ratio between Italy and the main European countries is still wide. Our work studies the dynamics of firms’ listings across European countries and investigates whether the lower development of the Italian market is due to the size of listed companies or to their relative number.
Between 2005 and 2018, the number of listed NFCs increased in Italy and Spain, while it declined in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The lower share of listed NFCs in Italy mainly accounts for the gap in market capitalization with France and the UK, while the smaller size of Italian public firms has a crucial bearing on the differences with Germany and Spain.
