Le peculiarità del reshoring manufatturiero in Italia: un'analisi basata su dati secondari.

The article focuses on manufacturing reshoring in Italy. After introducing the phenomenon, the paper compares data on manufacturing reshoring decisions implemented by Italian companies (121 decisions) with the corresponding data of European (excluding Italy (256) and US (329) ones. It is demonstrated that the relocation of production activities within the home country has a homogeneous magnitude between US and Europe. Available data are analyzed according the following variables: host country, industry, offshoring time span, governance mode (in- vs out-sourcing), and motivations. The main findings may be summarized as follows: a) Italian companies have an higher level of multiple reshoring decisions; b) while Italian and European companies relocate from Asia but also from other European countries, US firms generally reshore mostly China; c) Italian evidence are concentrated in few industries (with fashion as the most important) while European and US one are more diversified; d) the "made-in effect" is  the most relevant motivation for Italian companies (followed by customer responsiveness and quality of the offshored production) while in US and other European companies, economic motivations are as important as the customer-related ones. Authors suggest to policy makers the adoption of industrial policies aimed to: improve the facility of "doing business”, incentivize the adoption of innovation strategies, and support the development of human capital. Finally, they suggest introducing decision supporting tools that may help managers to correctly evaluate the performance of off-shoring activities and the benefits (if any) of reshoring decisions.