The Bel Paese and the transition to a service economy

The aim of the present essay is to reconstruct the development of the service sector, and to analyse the characteristics of the services, so as to provide an evaluation of the contribution they have made to Italy’s economic growth. Italy completed the transition to a service economy during the final twenty years of the twentieth century, following the development of personal and social services at first, and then of producer services thereafter. Nevertheless, the history of the service sector goes back well before then, and its initial expansion coincided with the beginning of the process of industrialisation. The services’ contribution to Italy’s economic growth has not been of a homogeneous nature: certain segments, such as tourism, played a vital role in that economic growth during the initial industrialisation of the country, by guaranteeing the equilibrium of the trade balance. Others, such as facility management, merely accompanied Italy’s economic transformation.