6  technologies is low, thus reducing the return on skills and discouraging investment in human capital.7 In the almost twenty years between 1999 and 2017, investment in intangible goods, more than half of which on R&D and patents, only grew by 30 per cent in Italy compared with 70 per cent in France and Germany and 140 per cent in Spain.
In relation to GDP, investment in intangibles in Italy (3 per cent) is today below that of Germany (4 per cent) and France (6 per cent) and on a par with that of Spain that has almost doubled in the meantime. The spread of the new digital technologies, while growing, is still below the euro-area average.