An attempt to quantify the technological change in Italy through a multisectoral framework: a comparative analysis.

From the study of the recent technological progress, it emerges, within the scholars, the idea of a fourth industrial revolution, centred on the digitalisation of the productive processes. This revolution is aimed to lead the transfer from the Human to Machine to the Machine-to-Machine Revolution. This phase is anticipated by a preparatory phase of provision of new tools for the information and communication, which constitute the instruments through which this technological advance can be realized, sometimes referred as the third industrial revolution. On the applied side, the Global competitive index ranking of 2019, evaluates the economic and technological performance of the different countries of the world. This is done based on various parameters among which Innovation Capability and ICT adoption. According to this ranking Italy is graded at the 30th place (53rd in ICT adoption and 22nd place in Innovation Capability). The aim of this work is to evaluate quantitatively, as possible, the place of the Italian economy in implementing the Information and Communication Technology, comparing the Italian outcomes with those of The Netherlands, a European country that has gained a position among other countries. The Netherlands, in fact, occupy the 4th place, behind Singapore, the United States and Hong Kong, overtaking Germany and Switzerland. Its innovation capability is at 10th place in the world and its ICT adoption is at 24th place. The analysis adopts the multisectoral Input-Output viewpoint, starting from the last available Input- Output Flow Tables retrieved from the WIOD database. This database provides a homogeneous statistical basis from which the sectoral macroeconomic results of the two countries can be conveniently compared. A preliminary comparison is centred on the sectoral composition of the main macroeconomic variables in order to identify for each macro-variable its structural content with adjustments according to the dimension of each economy. The analysis continues with the interindustry linkages determination, whose results could confirm and detail the different position of the two economies in the world ranking. A further development of this work would be moving the linkage analysis to the global value chain. To this aim, the role of linkages shift from an inter-sectoral perspective to an intercountry one. The global value chain, in fact, includes both “upstream” activities, identified by the backward linkages. Through them a country, in fact a supplier, exports intermediate goods to another country, identified as “downstream” producer, which refine the good to the aim of further export. WIOD database seem to provide convenient aggregation for both the linkage analysis and the global value chain, through import by commodity, country of origin and country of destination.