The importance of economic intelligence for fostering national competitiveness: a comparison between France and Italy

Abstract

The end of the Cold War shifted the focus from military to economic power, and from geostrategy to geoeconomics. This change led to other dependent major shifts, such as an erosion of the nation-state institutions’ power in favor of international institutions; the opening of markets to a global audience, hence global competition; governments have found themselves competing based on their economic power instead of their military system, deriving that their economic and financial assets became more relevant to their political influence rather than their military power. This resulted in the necessity of fostering national productivity and competitiveness in order to boost each state’s power on the international scene. One of the areas geoeconomic literature suggests to focus on to achieve this task is economic intelligence. This includes actors that play in both the public and private sectors and aims at creating state-run and corporate structures, which will be part of a greater economic intelligence device. Among the first countries to grasp the importance of such system we find the United States, which after World War II enacted public information policies and built a structure resembling their system for the disclosure of information collected by public and private organizations to foster national economic actors. Their model was soon followed by countries such as Japan and France, while other states have been lagging on developing a similar infrastructure, as in the case of Italy. The Italian Republic today isn’t equipped with a defined economic intelligence system, however there has been a shown interest towards the establishment of one through the ratification of the Law 124/2007, which established the Information System for the security of the Republic and reformed the Italian intelligence sector. The objective of this thesis is to make a comparison between the economic intelligence system developed by France and the first steps taken by Italy concerning the same field, as the two countries show a very similar economic structure, in order to underline the importance of such system for Italy’s economic competitiveness and its influence on the global scene. The analysis leads to the need for an improved coordination between Italian intelligence agencies and national firms in order to be able to share strategic information that could foster competitiveness and protect national assets.