Le tendenze dell'innovazione e il governo della domanda effettiva

Development can be understood as a movement from a series of activities based on primary products to a range of knowledge-based activities. Attempts to incorporate technical progress into the neoclassical production function are partial. A dynamic analysis of development, identified as the qualitative evolution of the economy, helps a better understanding of what hides behind economic growth. The production system never resembles itself: innovation and learning change both the amounts of capital and labor combined in the production function, and transform the way inputs are mixed too. These features of development and industrial production change either the “sign” of investment, and the evolution of effective demand. As a result, on one side, technological innovation embedded into investment directly affects the structure of production costs through a continuous process; on the other, it indirectly affects effective demand. These considerations open the way to a couple of relevant implications. First, the focus on particular ways to manage effective demand (i.e. the specific coordination between private consumption and investment, technical knowledge and public expenditure) may be the fitting theoretical framework where setting any new industrial policy based on innovation. Second, the growth of international markets integration, industrial production and technological intensity in investments and consumption goods, calls countries to be active part of the development process. Indeed, the possibility to achieve a path of sustainable economic growth is led by either the ability to consolidate (even to build) a “background knowledge” enabling to select suitable techniques from foreign countries, and the development of an autonomous innovative capacity. Setting these observations into our national perspective, one may observe that the peculiar nature of the economic and industrial Italian crisis weakens public policies addressed towards public and private investments. Only investments capable to change the productive structure (specialization) could revive Italy in international and national markets. Thus, the substantive economic questions of what to produce, how to produce and to whom, need now to be targeted so one can promote a shift of the country towards a paradigm of higher research and development intensity.