TOP CONTRIBUTORS

Mago Wiz

Quite not surprisingly, I see that there's no article introducing to investing in my homecountry: this is, indeed, bad news.

Despite being renown and appreciated for so much, Italy is nowdays looming in a sort of steady, slow decline as far as its economy (among so much more) is concerned. Early last week, the former US Ambassador to Italy R.Spogli gave a speech in which a very sad picture of the country is depicted: Italy appears locked in bureocracy, little foreign investments, widespread corruption, complex and redundant regulation.

Hardly a sector can be found in which any Italian industries operate as market leaders or at least as relevant innovators in the global environment. Healthy local companies are those that are more heavily subsidized, or strictly linked to the government. In recent years, most of the entities that were challenged to go public, either because they were more open and well set in their busines or just because their economics put them in the position to be attacked, were fiercely "defended" by politicians that didn't mean to let slip away a single piece of the huge network of the official and unofficial control that politics has over the economy. The case-history of Alitalia well represents the general approach to regulating business in the country (ad it was just the last of a long series of cases in which an opportuinity to let business flourish in a more dynamic market was lost)

At the end of the story (to be continued)