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RE4IT Group

The main objective of the RE4IT group is to support the Italian economy to regain attractiveness through the reshoring of some strategic manufacturing and supply activities, thus favouring a faster recover from the economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemics within the PNRR. More specifically, our aim is to develop comprehensive knowledge on the back- and near-shoring phenomena in order:

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1) to support companies to plan, design and implement reshoring initiatives; 2) to support policy-makers at regional and national level in developing a set of industrial policies supporting reshoring and potentially integrating them with existing policies supporting Industry 4.0, digitalization and the Green New Deal, with the aim of improving the attractiveness of our territories in order to:
 a) favor manufacturing back-shoring decisions implemented by national companies;
 b) help Italian and foreign companies to relocate some of their supply activities towards national companies and support the latter to adapt their products and services to reshoring companies;
 c) attract new companies headquartered in the European macro-region and willing to near-shore their production activities to Italy;
 d) discourage delocalization of foreign companies already established in our territories.
3) to stimulate the scientific and public debate on the reshoring topic, based on the “regionalization scenario” expected after the Covid-19 pandemics (UNCTAD, 2020).

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The group emphasizes the importance to analyse the economic rationales behind business decisions: in this vein, microeconomics, industrial economics, theory of the firm and behavioral economics are used to study entrepreneurship and firm growth strategies, including innovation activities, internationalization choices, inter-firm cooperation and integration decisions.

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We explore local and multinational enterprises as organizations embedded in a context formed by economic, social, technological, political and institutional factors, which collectively affect the operations of business. As we study firms’ decision making and their strategic interacting on the markets, we constantly investigate the influence of both external forces and formal and informal institutions at national and international level on business. In doing so, we focus on industrial and institutional dynamics, economic geography and global integration, as well as on regulation, industrial and innovation policy. We reserve attention to the multifaceted linkages between business enterprises, public players, third sector organizations and perform evaluation studies on the impact of different policy measures.

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The group deems business investment in productive capacity, new technologies and infrastructure as the chief engine of economic growth. At the same time, we aim at understanding the effects of firm operations on society and the environment. Special attention is reserved to the role played by business players in the development of lower income countries, by investigating sustainable innovations for the efficient use of resources and environment conservation.

While the Group makes use of many different research methods, its members privilege the development of theoretical frameworks and the use of econometric methods for the analysis. Members contribute to develop and maintain datasets on the different research topics of interest, and to build specific indicators for the analysis of problems.

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