The location factors of the Italian transport and logistics investments in the European countries

Italy is known as a “multinational follower” because of its lower rate of outward direct investments compared to the other industrialized countries. In fact, in 2006 the percentage ratio between the outward Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and the GDP is about 20% (UNCTAD, 2007), the half of the European Union average value and strongly lower than the main ratio of the closest partners (i.e. Germany with a rate of 34.5% and France with 48.3%). Nevertheless, in the last decades the investments of the Italian transport and logistics firms have grown very quickly. According to Mariotti and Mutinelli (2009), since 2000 to 2006, the so-called pre-crisis period, the number of employees in the foreign affiliates of the logistics Italian MNE increased of 64.3%, while in the same period the investments undertaken by the Italian manufacturing MNE decreased. The main destination areas of Italian outward transport and logistics FDI tend to be the European countries, especially West Europe (45% in 2010), while Central East Europe accounts for the 16% (in 2010) of total FDI (Maggi and Mariotti, 2011). West European countries are, indeed, the main destination of Italian export, while the Centre-Eastern countries especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s have attracted several manufacturing delocalisation projects (Mariotti, Piscitello, 1995; Venables, 1999; Baldone at al., 2002; Mariotti and Montagnana, 2008; Elia et al., 2011). This trend seems confirm that the logistics industry is strongly demand-driven: the transport and logistics providers follow their customers in the internationalisation processes (market-seeking investments) (Maggi, Mariotti, 2010). The present paper starts from this assumption and aims at identifying the main determinants of the Italian FDI in transport and logistics towards the European Countries (Guimarães et al., 2007; Hong, 2007 a,b). In order to do that, an econometric analysis is developed, where the dependent variable is the number of outward FDI undertaken by the Italian transport and logistics MNE in Europe (data come from the LogINT - Logistics and Internationalisation- database, Politecnico di Milano). The paper is structured into five sections. The introduction is followed by a literature review on the FDI determinants, and specifically, on those belonging to the transport and logistics industry. Section three is dedicated to data and methodology. Descriptive statistics and the results of the econometric estimation are described and discussed in section four. Section five concludes the paper.