How to transform the Italian state from hibernator to innovator

The governments of France and Great Britain are proposing to direct their national economies towards roles of global industrial leadership: Macron focuses on microchips, Sunak on technology. It’s Italy? With a national economy already hyper-fragmented into micro-sectors and micro-enterprises which, if on the one hand constitute a valuable diversification of production specializations, on the other do not have the organizational and market dimension to aspire to positions of global leadership, the Italian state if anything, it has so far proved to be a factor of hibernation, not of innovation. The characteristic functions of the Republic, from justice to bureaucracy, from social security to welfare, from universal education to public health, systematically play a role of obstacle – if not explicit impediment – to the efficient allocation of production factors and innovation. The current government explicitly places itself in the same vein, celebrating conservation, tradition, identity issues, the exaltation of the past. The factual proof is in the numbers. The sum of public spending on pensions, layoffs, subsidies to decommissioned companies, de facto nationalization of banks and non-market companies, inadequate infrastructure maintenance, useless if not harmful jobs is orders of magnitude higher than that for research, development and innovation. 98 percent of labor expenditure goes to subsidies, layoffs and basic income, and only 2 percent to active policies. Spending on pensions is five times the expenditure on education. In recent years, the latter has further decreased compared to the other items of unproductive public expenditure.