In the second bucket we could find other firms – mostly in the services sector, small, domestically oriented – which were not. According to revised figures recently released by our national statistical office (Istat), labor productivity in the manufacturing sector has increased by 23 per cent since 1995, that of the services sector has remained almost stagnant.
As a result, total economy's productivity has increased by a meagre 6 per cent in twenty years, one of the worst performances in the advanced world. Clearly the future of our economy will depend on the relative weights of the two buckets and on the ability of the regulatory and institutional framework to incentivize corporates to climb from the lower to the higher.