Rome’s “Made in Italy 2030” strategy, prepared by Minister of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT)’s Studies and Analysis Unit, redefines manufacturing as a source of economic strength and national security. The document builds on the Green Paper on Industrial Policy presented in October 2024 and follows a year-long public consultation involving institutions, industry and social partners.
Decoding the news: As globalisation fragments and industrial competition intensifies, Italy is formally abandoning the idea that manufacturing is a legacy sector. With Made in Italy 2030, Rome presents industry as a strategic asset — economically, geopolitically and socially — aligning itself with the broader Western return to industrial policy.
The context: Italy has released its first comprehensive industrial strategy in more than three decades, outlining a roadmap to 2030 aimed at reversing long-term stagnation in productivity and value added while preserving one of Europe’s largest manufacturing bases.
- The document is explicitly framed as a national strategy rather than a sectoral plan, designed to be updated every five years and coordinated across ministries, regions and EU instruments
Why it matters: The strategy marks a conceptual break with Italy’s post-1990s economic model in three ways:
- From horizontal to selective policy. Instead of generic incentives, Rome endorses targeted industrial ecosystems and value chains.
- From market-correcting to state-shaping. The state is no longer just fixing market failures; it is actively steering industrial transformation.
- From efficiency to resilience. Security of supply, energy autonomy and control over critical technologies are treated as strategic priorities.
This places Italy squarely within the global shift toward “new-generation industrial policies,” already visible in the U.S., China and increasingly across Europe.
What the data say: The document offers a blunt diagnosis: Italy has avoided the collapse of manufacturing employment and output share seen elsewhere in the West, but has failed to grow industrial value added.
Between the mid-1990s and today:
- Italy’s manufacturing value added has largely stagnated.
- Its share of global industrial output has declined sharply.
- Productivity growth has lagged behind Germany, France and the U.S.
Yet Italy retains:
- one of the EU’s highest shares of manufacturing in exports,
- a dense network of specialised SMEs,
- strong comparative advantages in high-quality, medium- to high-technology niches.
The strategy’s core assumption is that this residual industrial strength can still be leveraged — but only through deliberate public action
The industrial architecture. Rather than focusing on individual sectors, Made in Italy 2030 is organised into 18 integrated production chains that cover most of the Italian economy.
They range from traditional pillars — agro-food, fashion, furniture, automation — to emerging or security-relevant domains such as:
- health industries,
- defence and space,
- shipbuilding and the blue economy,
- energy, digital and microelectronics,
- logistics and integrated services.
The logic is ecosystem-based: strengthening upstream and downstream links, suppliers, skills and capital, not just headline firms.
The “new Made in Italy”. A central concept in the document is the distinction between traditional excellence and what it calls the new Made in Italy.
Rome argues that Italy’s industrial identity must evolve from craftsmanship-driven exports toward:
- advanced manufacturing,
- dual-use technologies,
- energy and environmental transition industries,
- strategic services linked to industry.
This reframing allows Italy to position defence, space, energy infrastructure and digital technologies not as exceptions, but as natural extensions of its industrial model.
Europe, but faster. The strategy is openly critical — though diplomatically — of Europe’s slower response to global industrial competition.
Italy supports:
- stronger EU demand-side tools,
- reinforced IPCEIs,
- coordinated European investment in critical technologies.
At the same time, Rome makes clear that national speed matters: waiting for EU-wide consensus risks locking Italy into a defensive posture vis-à-vis the U.S. and China.
The 2030 horizon. By the end of the decade, Italy set out ten strategic objectives, including:
- remaining among the world’s top industrial economies,
- increasing productivity, wages and skilled employment,
- reducing energy dependence,
- strengthening economic security and supply-chain resilience,
- playing an active role in Western re-industrialisation.
Notably, social cohesion and territorial balance are treated as industrial policy outcomes, not side effects — linking growth, employment, and political stability.
Between the lines: This is not a neutral policy paper. It is a strategic narrative.
- Italy is signalling that it no longer intends to rely solely on export competitiveness and entrepreneurial resilience, but to rebuild state capacity in industrial strategy, after decades of fragmentation.
- Execution will be decisive. But the message is already clear:
Italy wants to be counted not just as a manufacturing survivor, but as a strategic industrial power in a more contested global economy.
Save the date: The White Paper “Made in Italy 2030,” prepared by the Ministero delle Imprese e del Made in Italy, will be officially presented at the Consiglio Nazionale dell’Economia e del Lavoro (CNEL). The presentation will take place on January 29, 2026, starting at 10:00 AM, at the Marco Biagi Plenary Hall in Villa Lubin, in Rome
- The program:
- Opening remarks: Renato Brunetta, President of CNEL
- Speakers: Paolo Quercia, Head of the Studies and Analysis Unit, MIMIT; Cristina Sgubin, Secretary General of Telespazio and Board Member at ENI and SACE; Paolo Pirani, CNEL Councillor
- Closing remarks: Adolfo Urso, Minister of Enterprises and Made in Italy
