For years American investors—companies and individuals—have perceived Italy as a complicated place to do business. A legal system which makes the rule of law uncertain and untimely, employer-unfriendly labor laws, and a stiflingly bureaucratic public administration comprise three reasons why aggregate private investment in Italy from the U.S. since the end of World War II has been the lowest of any country in Western Europe with the exception of Portugal. Trends in recent years have not represented much of an improvement.
When I served as Ambassador to Italy from 2005-2009 in the second administration of President George W. Bush, the U.S. Embassy developed a program to approach this lack of investment in a novel way. Based upon an in-depth understanding of the structure of Italian industries, we focused our efforts primarily on venture capital and private equity as practices to spur investment, bypassing or at least minimizing many of the structural impediments listed above.
