Re-Shoring and Resilience in Italy during and after the Crisis

Abstract

Since 1990s, companies have started to shift their productions to the low-cost countries and this strategy is commonly known as offshoring. However, over the past years, the evidence shows that offshoring strategies may not continue to be beneficial for the organization’s companies activities. Consequently during the recent years, companies have begun to pay more attention to unquantifiable factors, such as the supply chain issue and strategy factors rather than simply relying on and the lowest price that in turn can mean the highest risk and high total cost. Having considered the discrepancy between the initially estimates cost of offshoring and those of actually occurred, companies are coming back through re-shoring strategies. In this paper, an overview of the main literature has been conducted to provide a better understanding of the term re-shoring. In the first section, various definitions and explanation of the concept of re-shoring will be presented. After that, the main motivations behind the re-shoring are discussed. The second part relies on the concept of resilience. We analyze resilience as a resource and response to the recent economic and financial crisis. In particular, this paper analyzes the role of economic resilience of the territories belonging to companies that have adopted offshoring strategies in the past and whether this has contributed to repatriation phenomena. In this regard, with the aid of recent data, we intend to understand the behavior of companies that have carried out re-shoring actions and their links with the economic resilience of the Italian regions. We also present whether there is a relationship at regional level between companies that have made re-shoring choices and the degree of economic resilience of a regional area. Finally, the critical considerations will be presented.