After three years of research, the SDA Bocconi Subsidized Finance Monitor , in collaboration with Golden Group, can finally state that companies using subsidized finance regard it as a concrete lever for carrying out investments that they otherwise would have postponed or abandoned altogether. In 77% of cases, the relevant resources enabled companies to launch expansion projects that they would not have undertaken without public support.
After years marked by emergencies and extraordinary measures linked to the pandemic, Italy’s subsidized finance system appears to have completed a transition toward more structural objectives: sustainability, digital transformation, competitiveness, and productive investment. Importantly, this signals that public incentives are returning to serve the purpose for which they were originally designed: contributing to modernizing the economy, rather than simply offsetting the effects of temporary crises.
Alongside these positive developments, however, critical issues have persisted throughout the three-year observation period. The proliferation of calls for proposals for small local projects continues to generate fragmentation, while companies report difficulties in navigating available opportunities and bureaucratic complexity, and in contending with delays in disbursements. While the system appears more mature in terms of its objectives, the same cannot be said for ease of access or the ability to systematically measure impacts.
A source of financial resources or competitiveness?
The third edition of the Monitor concludes a research program launched in 2024 with a dual aim: understanding how subsidized finance contributes to the development of Italian companies and clarifying the conditions which determine its effectiveness.
The first two editions showed that incentives can give rise to substantial benefits when they are aligned with corporate strategy. What’s more, there has been a gradual shift from an emergency-driven logic to one focused on competitiveness. The third year zooms out even further as researchers seek to answer three key questions:
- How is the subsidized finance market evolving in terms of beneficiaries, objectives, and instruments?
- What concrete impacts do beneficiary companies perceive?
- Do obstacles still exist that limit the effectiveness of public incentives?
Fragmentation and administrative noise
The quantitative analysis examined 3,031 calls for proposals published between 2022 and 2025, excluding several major European programs that might have distorted the overall representation of the phenomenon. The research was complemented by case studies of selected companies and a survey that counted 647 valid responses, primarily from small and medium-sized enterprises operating in manufacturing, trade, and services.
The analysis first confirms a characteristic that already emerged in previous years: The system runs at two different speeds. Local calls for proposals accounted for 85% of initiatives published in 2025 but absorbed only about 15% of the available resources. National programs remain relatively few in number but continue to garner the vast majority of financial allocations. This imbalance fuels the risk of proliferating fragmentation, with numerous small programs generating administrative noise without necessarily producing proportionate impacts.
In terms of beneficiaries, subsidized finance remains strongly oriented toward micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises when measured by the number of programs available. However, when considering the value of the resources on offer, large companies also retain broad access opportunities. In any case, somewhat counterintuitively, smaller firms are more effective when it comes to actually receiving the resources they have been awarded.
As for the instruments used, tax credits are the most common for companies, followed by non-repayable grants and subsidized loans. Compared with previous years, hybrid schemes that combine different forms of support are on the rise, a sign of ever greater sophistication in public policy design.
The survey helps explain how companies perceive these instruments:
- 77.3% of respondents stated that they carried out investments that they otherwise would have postponed or never launched.
- Incentives cover, on average, about one-third of total investment costs, confirming that they rarely replace private resources but often act as accelerators of corporate investment decisions.
The perceived impacts are concentrated primarily on ramped up production capacity, expanded product and service offerings, the development of innovative processes, cost reduction, and operational efficiency. Positive effects also emerge in skills development and access to new markets. Furthermore, three out of four companies report that they earmarked these investments for medium- and long-term objectives, indicating an increasingly strategic rather than tactical use of subsidized finance.
But major challenges remain. Specifically, companies point to the complexity of application procedures, the hard work of sorting through available programs, the burden of reporting requirements, and delays in disbursements as the main obstacles. We should also note that around half of the companies do not analytically measure the impacts arising from funded investments, highlighting a serious limitation in their ability to assess the actual return on these initiatives.
An accelerator of investment
The challenge for the future is to improve the quality, focus, and ease of use of funding programs. Less dispersion of resources, greater continuity in available instruments, and more accessible procedures could amplify the positive impacts we have already observed.
For managers, a lesson emerges that is consistent with the findings from the entire research program. Subsidized finance generates the best results when it is integrated into corporate strategy. Companies that begin with a clearly defined project and use incentives as accelerators of investment achieve benefits that extend far beyond a simple financial advantage.
Gianluca Meloni (a cura di). Il terzo anno di attività . A presentation by the Subsidized Finance Monitor .
Gianluca Meloni , Eleonora Santoli , Andrea Morello . Le evidenze della survey . A presentation by the Subsidized Finance Monitor .
For further reading on this topic, you can find the articles on the first two years of research by the Monitor here:
Meloni - Helpful, but… When subsidized finance actually works .
Meloni - Subsidized finance: fewer emergencies and more structural investments .
