The effect of Foreign Direct Investments on the emergence of ICT specializations in Italian provinces

The analysis carried out in this thesis is aimed at checking whether the emergence of ICT specializations in Italian provinces is affected o not (and in case it is, to which extent) by an injection of capital from abroad through Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs). Firstly, information about Italian companies from 1999 to 2019 has been extracted from AIDA dataset. Thereafter, all the extracted data have been re-organized in a more compact structure that includes the variables of interest (like the initials of the provinces’ name or the timespan considered, that is a triennium) for companies working in the ICT sector only. Secondly, the content of fDi Markets dataset has been analyzed and filtered in order to highlight Foreign Direct Investments directed in Italy in ICT sector, from 2003 to 2019. Then, again the whole dataset has been re-organized such that it matches the structure used in the previous dataset for Italian companies. Finally, the two datasets have been combined to create a single dataset containing all the information needed to carry on the analysis, linking the dependent variable (related to the specialization in ICT in a single province) to the independent ones (like the FDIs). Moreover, the dataset containing the number of ICT patents per Italian province has been re-organized and added to the final one, and so the number of patents is one of the independent variables as well. The linear regression has been used for understanding the effect of independent variables on the ICT specialization, and more specifically the regression with binary dependent variables’ theory has been applied (since the dependent variable here is a dummy). General results from another paper lead to acknowledge a non-significant effect of FDIs on industry specialization, while they are actually effective in case there is already a technological identity in the region where the capital is injected. This effect is even reinforced in case of involvement of R&D activities, and it is also negatively related to the prior existing knowledge of the region. Therefore, this thesis wants to analyze the global effect of Foreign Direct Investments on local ICT specialization and verify whether the results are comparable with previous studies’ ones or not.