Internationalization and performance of the Italian automotive supply chain: evidence for designing policies

The debate on the relationship between internationalization and performance is still open and is a hot topic for policymakers who promote specific policies, but ignore the real results for most of the firms supported. Differently from previous literature, the paper is based on a large and original database on a period of seven years that considers quantitative-qualitative and control variables. To reduce industry and country heterogeneity we focused on the Italian automotive supply chain. Our contribution is to provide results partially in contrast with other internationalization/performance theories or models. In particular, we identify subsamples of firms where internationalization policies could be more effective