Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2014
As a host country for foreign direct investment, conventional measures suggest that Italy is not a very attractive location. However, based upon a new database of the one hundred largest multinationals in the country, this article shows that foreign firms consistently played a crucial role in Italy's industrial activities throughout the twentieth century. A detailed analysis of investment patterns, distribution across industries, and entry modes reveals that they concentrated their investment in sectors of high technological and scale intensity, such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, where domestic capabilities and competition remained weak during much of the period.
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8 The Database, named FOR_IMITA.DB has been built combining existent information on Italian joint-stock companies with extensive archival research. The result is a dataset containing information about the largest one hundred companies under foreign control for eight benchmarks during the twentieth century, with information concerning share capital, total assets, country of origin, sector of activity, year of entry, and entry strategy.
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19 Central Italy includes Tuscany, Umbria, the Marshes, Latium, and Abruzzi; Southern Italy includes Campania, Calabria, Puglia/Apulia, Molise, Basilicata, Sicily, and Sardinia.
20 The Second Industrial Revolution here is meant as the wave of technological innovations in the fields of energy, chemicals, oil refining, food processing, and metallurgy based upon energy- and scale-intensive processes that diffused among industrialized countries starting in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
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