A comprehensive ex‐post assessment of the Italian RES policy: deployment, jobs, value added and import leakages

by Mattia Cai, Niccolò Cusumano, Arturo Lorenzoni and Federico Pontoni

A massive deployment of renewable electricity generation took place in Italy in less than eight years.
A generous feed-in tariff, coupled with favourable institutional conditions, allowed the installation of more than 28 GW of PV, wind and other RES technologies. By 2014, Italy has already attained its 2020 goals on RES production. Besides, environmental objectives and compliance with EU targets, the policy was aimed at promoting green jobs and industrial production of RES technologies. Exante economic analyses advocated considerable economic and industrial spill-overs from the introduction of RES support policies. Despite official rhetoric and ex-ante studies about jobs and economic growth associated to RES adoption, at scholarly level there is no consensus on the actual effects and implications of these policies on National economies. This paper provides a first comprehensive ex-post analysis of the Italian case, filling an important gap. Our analysis is carried out with the development of a specific input-output model, with refined technological vectors and with the internalization of trade coefficients. We show that the effects have been unequivocally lower than expected; that most of the jobs created belonged to the service sector and not to the industrial sector and that the value added was much lower than expected due to significant export leakages.