Italy in Investment Ranking

ILF (ITALYLAWFIRMS) is a group of professionals that have a large experience in assisting foreign investors (both individuals and undertakings) that invested  in Italy.

ILF staff is composed by Italian Lawyers, accountants, web experts, engineers that have collaborated with International investors to find and create BUSINESS/START UP in Italy over the past 15 years in many fields like REAL ESTATE/WEB/DIGITAL /INDUSTRIAL/ INVESTEMENTS/

• 2017, the World Investment Report 2018 of UNCTAD ranked Italy 19th among the countries in the world that attract most investments; in the three-year period 2015-2017, our country has attracted approximately 59 billion USD compared to the 47 billion of the previous three-year period 2012-2014.

• The latest Foreign Direct Investment Confidence Index 2018 report, produced by A.T. Kearney, positions Italy on the 10th place (compared to the 13th in 2017 and the 16th in 2016). Our country thus surpasses India, Singapore and Spain, after having exceeded the results of the Netherlands, Brazil and Taiwan the previous year. The index measures, on an annual basis, the impact of the economic and regulatory policies and changes on the investment intentions of CEOs and other Decision Makers of around a thousand global businesses.

• Italy is placed 46th ( after ranking 50th in 2017) of the Ease of Doing Business Index of the World Bank’s of the Doing Business Report, 2018 of the World Bank. The index measures the quality and efficiency of the business environment, of the bureaucracy and administration of 189 economies in the world on the basis of 10 sub-indicators (from the facility to open a new business activity to the payment of taxes). With reference to the “Trading Across Borders” sub-indicator, which measures the timing of goods clearance procedures, Italy is reconfirmed for the third consecutive year at the 1st place in the world ranking.
• The Global Attractiveness Index 2017 of the European House – Ambrosetti places Italy in 16th place in terms of attractiveness for Foreign Direct Investments (FDI).

• The “brand Italy” is placed  9th for economic value and strength of the brand-country under an economic-numerical profile according to the study of Brand Finance in partnership with FDI Intelligence – Financial Times, 2017. Between 2016 and 2017, the “brand Italy” has measured a growth of 500 billion USD, ranking on the 4th place in terms of modifications (going from a value of 1.521 billion to a value of 2.034 billion USD) and positioning itself ahead of the USA and Japan.

From 2016 to 2017, our country has grown more than the US (first in the ranking of the strongest nation brands) and Japan. In absolute terms, the “Italian brand” is on the 9th place.

• In 2017, Italy ranked 2nd (ahead of the UK, Germany and Belgium) in the Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) Digital Tax Index, created together with the University of Mannheim and the European Center for Economic Research (ZEW). The index calculates the effective tax burden on investments in business digitaliization in 33 countries.
• According to the latest report published by the Reputation Institute in 2017 (Country RepTrak) Italy ranks 14th among the countries with a strong reputation, coming before Germany and Great Britain.

• In 2017 our country moved from the 44th to the 43rd place in the 2017-2018 Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum (which compares 138 economies by providing information on factors like productivity and wealth).

The positioning of Italy in the above-mentioned indexes is not always coherent with the country’s macroeconomic realities, thus resulting in potential negative consequences in the perception that foreign investors get. In the context of the ongoing national strategy’s  consolidation, with the aim of attracting investments from abroad, an action plan was accordingly implemented to improve Italy’s positioning in the various international rankings developed by both public and private bodies. To this end, the Committee for Foreign Investment Attraction (CIE) has created an International Indexes Working Group (for further details see: Governance).

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