The Geoeconomics/Politics of Italy's Investment Promotion Community

Through an historical analysis, this article discusses outward investments promotion as an underexplored aspect of geoeconomics. The empirical focus is on Italy's institutional support to the internationalization of firms from 1992 to 2015, between the post-socialist transformation of Central and Eastern Europe and the years following the global crisis of 2008. The main argument is that large geopolitical events led to complex interactions between Italy's firms and policymakers. These interactions reshaped Italy's geo-economic strategies as well as territorialities. The article identifies the emergence and consolidation of a group of public, semi-public and private actors, thus building a new model of an investment promotion community (IPC). It finds that (a) the IPC emerged to provide an institutional infrastructure necessary to project Italy's sovereignty beyond national boundaries and (b) in so doing, the elites involved interpreted firms' needs within broader political issues. Thus, the emergence of the IPC represents a shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics.