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Multinationals and Economic Development in Italy during the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2014

Andrea Colli
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Abstract

As a host country for foreign direct investment, conventional measures suggest that Italy is not a very attractive location. However, based upon a new database of the one hundred largest multinationals in the country, this article shows that foreign firms consistently played a crucial role in Italy's industrial activities throughout the twentieth century. A detailed analysis of investment patterns, distribution across industries, and entry modes reveals that they concentrated their investment in sectors of high technological and scale intensity, such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, where domestic capabilities and competition remained weak during much of the period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 303 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2014 

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References

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19 Central Italy includes Tuscany, Umbria, the Marshes, Latium, and Abruzzi; Southern Italy includes Campania, Calabria, Puglia/Apulia, Molise, Basilicata, Sicily, and Sardinia.

20 The Second Industrial Revolution here is meant as the wave of technological innovations in the fields of energy, chemicals, oil refining, food processing, and metallurgy based upon energy- and scale-intensive processes that diffused among industrialized countries starting in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

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57 As in the case of Tecnomasio Italiano, an electromechanic firm acquired by the Swiss Brown Boveri in 1898, three decades after its foundation in 1871. Brown Boveri took over the company in order to enter the Italian market as a supplier of railway electric engines before the nationalization of the network in 1905 to meet the future orders from the state railways. Stefania Licini, “Ercole Marelli e Tecnomasio italiano, dalle origini agli anni Trenta: Un tentativo di comparazione,” in Annali di storia dell'impresa 5–6 (1989–90).

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