Economy - published on 27 October 2023
Source: Unioncamere press office
Turin, Oct. 27, 2023 – The international picture is decidedly complex, but for a quarter of Italian companies, business will grow in 2024 while for most it will remain stable. This is revealed by an Ipsos-Unioncamere-Tagliacarne survey released today at the ongoing International Conference in Turin. The event, organized by Unioncamere in collaboration with the Turin Chamber of Commerce, takes stock of critical issues and challenges facing the national production system.
And the first step is precisely to understand what the sentiment of entrepreneurs is: 6 out of 10 believe that in the next 12 months the situation will remain stable for those doing business; for almost 25 percent, on the other hand, it will improve a lot or at least a little. The share of pessimists, then is close to 18%, down from last year when it was 42%. Of course, not all of the country maintains this profile. In fact, companies in the North show more optimism for the near future than those in Southern and Central Italy (in the North, optimists or “neutrals” are 85% while in the South that share drops to 81% and in the Center to 77%). Manufacturing and services also count the highest shares of firms leaning toward stable business performance in the coming months or its improvement, compared to trade.
The lack of certainty is now a structural element globally, but Italians are used to working with creativity. Already after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war we showed a great capacity for flexibility and resilience. And now we will do the same – said Unioncamere President Andrea Prete – Digital and green are driving business confidence about the future – he added – Between 2023 and 2025, 41 percent of companies (5-499 employees) plan to invest in the digital transition and 46% in the green transition. This is also why more companies expect their business to improve than those who estimate it to worsen (24% vs. 18%).
Elephantine bureaucracy, moreover, is a constraint that needs to be removed. According to the president of Unioncamere – it is necessary to simplify all those procedures that still hold back doing business in Italy and are experienced as too heavy a burden especially by younger people who want to set up their own business: as many as 7 out of 10 businesses under 35 see bureaucracy as the biggest obstacle to the use of PNRR resources.
The unknowns of the global context are considerable. The data presented at the meeting, the result of elaborations by Unioncamere and Centro studi Tagliacarne on the basis of the main national and international sources, show that world trade, which has been growing for about 20 years, has probably reached its ceiling: in fact, world exports of goods and services are consistently close to 30% of GDP. And this is while the dynamics of globalization are gradually changing the international picture with a growth in protectionist policies (in the first nine months of 2023, for every liberalization intervention there were 4 protectionist ones: 600 vs. 400), the assertion in business strategies of near and reshoring with the consequent shortening of global value chains, and the search by countries for strategic autonomy (in terms of energy and valuable raw materials) that has led, for example, the European Union to reduce dependence on non-EU countries to 65% of its supplies.
Faced with this context, the challenges at the European and Italian levels are multiple. It becomes a priority to accelerate on the investment front (which in Europe has grown by an average of only 3.6% a year over the past decade, compared with 7.2% in China, 6.5% in emerging Asian countries and 5.5% in the U.S.) and, at home, on the front of the use of EU funds (of those programmed for 2014-2020, only two-thirds of them have been used), including by facilitating access to them for businesses, which, as revealed by Unioncamere research, in one case out of two complain about excessive complexity of fulfillment and require support and assistance (these are the needs expressed by 19 and 18% of companies, respectively).
Staying in Italy, progress on the innovation front is nonetheless showing up.
Regarding sustainability, one in 4 companies has invested in green technologies with low environmental impact (but 15% believe that economic resources are insufficient to overcome this challenge and 5.2% complain about too high costs of green raw materials).
The adoption of digital lending by non-bank financial entities is also growing. In the G7-wide ranking, Italy ranks third, after the United States and the United Kingdom, for lending by non-banks, with $1.9 billion.
