Le imprese di costruzioni nei mercati esteri. Ipotesi di ricerca e alcune evidenze dal caso italiano

Companies' international expansion is a classic theme of business history. On the one hand, multinational business involves risks related to linguistic, cultural and market structure diversity. On the other hand, it has acted as an engine of integration of the world economy in the last two centuries. Among the first multinationals, building companies should also have played a non-secondary role. However, the historiography seems curiously not to have paid the necessary attention to this topic. This article identifies three key variables (political, financial and organizational) for understanding the constraints to which the expansion on international markets is typically subject, focusing on the Italian case. This article first underlies the importance of the foreign sector for some Italian construction companies in the second half of the twentieth century and especially in the post-2008 crisis years. It then focuses on the previous origins of this phenomenon, adopting Egypt as a case study, where international competition was intense. A long-term study may prove helpful to explain an apparent paradox, how some national excellences could emerge and compete globally in the building sector, while Italian companies, on the whole, were historically lagging behind in the international business.