The return of globalization and the affirmation of a new world scenario
Globalization, yes or no? Is the era of large commercial transactions over, and so too the resulting dependencies on the supply of raw materials that Italy does not have? Analysts are divided on this issue: there are those who argue that a new world order is upon us, while others defend the choice of globalization without alternatives. Unless you want to study new strategies and bear the costs.
The verticalization of the supply chain in fact poses several problems. Considering that the context of the Italian supply chain consists mainly of processing industries with low economic potential – their being mostly SMEs – launching large-scale processes to restitch the supply chain as the large French luxury groups have done in Italy is not easy.
Yet reviewing the intentions of companies, based on a study by the Bank of Italy in 2020,78% had no intention of reducing the number of their foreign suppliers. Only 5.7% took into consideration the idea of becoming independent and only 1.9% put these intentions into practice.
According to the authors of the study, the alignment of the supply chain necessarily involves an incisive external intervention of industrial policy in the broadest sense of the term. A similar intervention is, for example, the Chips Act wanted by EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, to produce semiconductors on a continental level.
From this point of view, the digital transition could be the cure for the delay of the country system. The overcoming, or at least the containment, of costs due to production could be achieved through the implementation of digital culture, also understood as the experimentation of innovative solutions in the company among top management, employees and suppliers.
The problem, which had not even emerged with the pandemic, concerns the link between the economy and politics: in the new global geopolitical scenario the Ukrainian crisis has shown us how this link becomes dangerous in the case of totalitarian contexts. In particular, the perception of a new world order with uncertain scenarios in which politics conditions and also intervenes in the economy is the thrust that is needed to rethink the strategies necessary to deal with this new framework. But this cannot happen by erasing the past.
