Para reflexão

Há tempos no FB recomendaram-me este artigo, obrigado, "Diagnosing the Italian Disease" de Bruno Pellegrino e Luigi Zingales.
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O abstract é pequeno e directo ao assunto:

"We try to explain why twenty years ago Italy’s labor productivity stopped growing. We find no evidence that this slowdown is due to the introduction of the euro or to excessively protective labor regulation. By contrast, we find that the stop is associated with small firms’ inability to rise to the challenge posed by the Chinese competition and to Italy’s failure to take full advantage of the ICT  revolution. Many institutional features can account for this failure. Yet, a  prominent one is the lack of meritocracy in managerial selection and promotion. Familism and cronyism appear to be the ultimate causes of the Italian disease."

Em Portugal as PME apanharam um choque bem maior com a China, porque estávamos num patamar abaixo dos italianos e, por isso, mais próximo do dos chineses.

"To explain such a sudden stop in productivity growth, we need to focus on what changed in the surrounding world in the mid- to late-1990s. The main exogenous shock is China’s entry in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The second shock is the introduction of the euro in 1999. The third and final one is the information technology revolution that took place starting in the mid-1990s. Since all these shocks are more or less contemporaneous, there is little hope of being able to separate one from the other by relying on the timing of the change alone.
To identify the cause of the Italian Disease (as we refer to it), we need to understand why these shocks, which hit all the other major European countries, had much more adverse effects in Italy.
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Finally, we try and quantify how much of Italy’s productivity gap can be explained by difficulties in the adoption of ICT. Looking at the regression in Table 3, we note that almost half of the difference between the Labor Productivity Gap (19.3%) and the Total Factor Productivity Gap (12.8%) can be directly attributed to scarce ICT capital accumulation. In addition, when we “correct” TFP growth by using the estimated response coefficient to the interaction of meritocracy and ICT capital contribution, the unexplained component of Italy’s labor productivity gap drops to just about 3.5%. The reason why lack of meritocracy can explain so much of Italy’s productivity growth gap during the ICT revolution lies in the fact that the managerial model followed by Italian firms appears to be profoundly different from that of other developed countries. Even after controlling for differences in firm size, the mean performance-oriented management index for Italian firms is about 0.8 standard deviations lower than the average for Austrian, French, German, Hungarian, Spanish, and British firms."

Há anos que defendemos aqui no blogue que a causa da doença portuguesa foi a China e que em 2008 o antídoto tinha sido encontrado e estava em disseminação natural por spillover.
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Recordar "Acerca da desvalorização interna" ou "It's not the euro, stupid! (parte IV)".
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Pessoalmente, empiricamente, arrisco dizer que o uso de ICT não está mal por cá na PME-tipo, embora haja espaço para melhorar.
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Quanto à gestão, é claro que em teoria podia ser melhor. Na prática, qualquer empresa viva num dado momento, desde que seja mantida pelos seus clientes e não por apoios e subsídios do Estado, é um caso de sucesso. A única forma adequada é não permitir que uma empresa sobreviva apesar de não ter clientes que a sustentem. A quantidade de empresas supostamente bem geridas que fecharam desde 2008 e a quantidade de empresas supostamente mal geridas que se mantiveram apesar de 2008, 2009 e 2011, 2012 e 2013.