Industrial districts: a means of restoring Italy’s attractiveness to investment?

Abstract

The work examines “The industrial districts: a lever to relaunch the attraction for Italy’s investments?”, bringing in relation the territorial dimension with the relevant economic and institutional aspects. On the other hand, exogenous productive investments can be a resource, a source of funding in itself valuable for districts, to consolidate and regenerate them, making them protagonists of the Italian presence on global markets. There are fewer studies on the attractiveness of industrial districts for investments, mainly characterized by econometric analysis of the significance of districtity as a factor of revealed attractiveness of IDE (Bronzini, 2003; De Propris et al. 2005), and on the effects of district scale IDEs (Meneghello et al, 2010). These results confirm the conclusions to which the analyses mentioned in the introduction of the IDE of districts (Bronzini, 2003; De Propris et al. 2005). From here, the logical deduction that they can act on to strengthen the country’s capacity to attract investments from abroad (together with others, evidently from the efficiency of the bureaucratic machine and the eradication of organised crime).

Keywords

Networks of enterprises; industrial districts; Industrial policy; Italy; Local authorities; direct foreign investment

JEL codes

L60; L14; R12