The Socio-Economic Impact of Public Policies in the Space Sector in Italy

The purpose of this work is assessing the impact of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) on the innovation and performance of the Italian space system. Based on descriptive evidence from three surveys and econometric analysis using balance-sheet, patent and scientometric data, we find that, when considering upstream companies and downstream intermediate users in the field of Earth observation (EO) as a whole, the socio-economic benefit – taxpayer cost ratio is higher than 1, and is particularly high in the downstream EO sector. As regards the upstream sector, the econometric analysis shows a significant effect of procurement on economic performance and innovation. Also for the downstream sector (companies and research centres), descriptive evidence from the surveys shows a positive effect of EO data on economic performance and innovation. Finally, we observe a significant impact of ASI also on scientific productivity