Renato Giannetti

Evolution of Italian Enterprises in the 20th Century

The historiography.- Industrial structure (1911-2001).- The concentration of the industrial structure (1913-1971).- The demography of manufacturing firms (1911-1971).- The largest 200 manufacturing firms (1913-2001).- Ownership and control in Italian capitalism (1911-1972).- Firm performance (1900-1971).- Business strategies from Unification up to the 1970s.- Entrepreneurs and managers (1913-1972).

The demography of manufacturing firms (1911–1971)

The dynamic of size distribution highlights three very interesting statistical inter-industrial regularities. Firstly, the dynamic distribution of the major firms shows a convergence towards the bottom of the size distribution, i.e. these firms grow but, the absolute size does not grow much because the firms that reach the highest stages recede. In fact, the entire universe of firms shows an extended series of leaping frogs, namely of firms that in the different phases, move many positions forward in the ranking of size classes, but also jump backwards, i.e. they do not remain stable.

Comments on the paper by Andrea Colli

I shall focus my comments on three topics addressed in the paper by Andrea Colli. The first, and possibly the most important, concerns the mittelstand. Although I must admit that the idea of separating out medium-sized businesses is an interesting exercise for a country like Italy, a number of issues still remain unresolved. First, I have noticed that the classification criteria vary, both in terms of dimension and of the variable considered. For example, firms are classified in terms of employees (Table 1) and in terms of value added (Table 2) (see article). As already mentioned, the size of the classes of business is also defined in different ways; the main point being that the choice of class size strongly influences the conclusion reached. On the basis of Colli’s Tables 1 and 2, there is no evidence of the fundamental importance of medium-sized businesses. If we take the European definition, in 2001 the category of 50–249 employees covered 19 per cent of employment, which is near the EU average of 15 per cent; small businesses still constitute the largest class, by far exceeding the European average. Even adopting the more appropriate classification of Table 2, the importance of medium size firms is still low: 17.3 per cent vs 48.7 per cent of small firms (1–49 employees) and 34 per cent of large ones (4500). For these reasons, I believe there is still much work to be done before the phenomenon is clearly defined. Another point refers to the explanation of the recent increase in number of medium-sized businesses. Colli explains this as, in part, the effect of the discontinuation in the 1970s of many large businesses, which created opportunities for small and medium-size ones in almost all branches of manufacturing, and in part, a consequence of growing competition for the small businesses of the industrial districts on the international markets. This provoked a process of progressive natural selection, giving rise to a number of medium-sized, internationally active businesses. A way to test which of the two explanations better suits the case could be to focus on the inter-temporal mobility of firms instead of on the distribution, in benchmark years, of categories based on size. By adopting a survival and mobility approach, it may be easier to explain whether mittelstand was the result of the increase in size of small businesses or of the downsizing of the largest ones (Giannetti and Velucchi 2006). Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15(1) 2010: 61–63