This paper investigates performance and entrepreneurship for Italian firms in the period 1998-2008. The authors set up performance and entrepreneurship indicators for Italian firms with 20 employed and more in the reference period and utilise the information coming from an integrated database based on data coming from SBS surveys and balance sheets. The analysis will outline the emerging trends in the Italian performance and entrepreneurship with a sectoral focus on more knowledge based sectors through the adoption of both Knowledge Intensive Sectors (KIS), than Pavitt classifications. The analysis is aimed to detect also the dynamics within sectors by means also of entrepreneurship indicators.

In particular the following issues will be faced:

– emerging sectors in the economic structure in terms of performance and competitiveness;

– diversity across sectors

– main transformation in the economic structure

The paper is focused on Italian firms for years 1989-1998-2008 with 20 persons employed and more. The paper will develop a suitable framework making available profiles of economic performance and entrepreneurship indicators both at firm than industry level for the reference period. Through the analysis of the distribution of performance and entrepreneurship through appropriate non parametric tests will be possible to stress the emerging trends across industries and across time in the firm structure. The main findings coming from distribution analysis will be synthesised by means of a principal component analysis and then grouped and ranked by means of a cluster analysis that will be useful to catch up the more relevant industry dynamics.

Keywords: Enterpreneurship; Productivity; Distribution analysis; Principal component analysis

Biography: He has spent a part of its activities on the field of innovation, Ict and firms analysis and he has acquired an in-depth experience in official statistics production methods and on data analysis. He experienced on the main official nomenclatures, on metadata, on survey management, on the data treatment & analysis.

His working experience on research comes from the job position in the Italian National Statistics Office ISTAT and from the involvement in some EU research projects that allowed him to cooperate with academic institutions.

From January 2006 in ISTAT he is a reference researcher of the survey 'Sistema dei conti delle imprese'. The survey is under the Structural Business Statistics regulation.of the European Union and provides economic data regarding firms with 100 and more employees in Italy.

From 2001 to 2005, he has been involved in the ICT usage in firms survey (under EU regulation from 2003) as survey manager