Institutional investors hold just over one tenth of corporate bonds. In France, where the capital market is more developed, the share is over 40 per cent. 8 And that is in a context where total bond issues are at much lower levels than in Italy.
Investors are certainly deterred by the limited development of pension funds and of intermediaries specializing in the placement and underwriting of corporate debt instruments, such as private debt funds, but there are also more wide-ranging reasons. Let’s look at the insurance sector. Insurers’ investments to cover technical reserves focus on Italian government securities, with little appetite for corporate bonds, much less equity.