Abstract

The article draws a profile of the last 25 years and frames within the general history of the world and of Italy the contributions that have been collected in this volume dedicated to 25 years of work of "l'industria", which are also 25 years of problems of industrial economics, both in the world and in Italy. The outlined profile is divided into two parts, the first devoted to the main features of the world history of the last 25 years and the second devoted to Italy in the same period, in brief. According to the author, from an economic point of view this last quarter of the century XX, that follows the previous quarter of the century called golden age, is actually dominated by the problem of unequal development of research, technology and production on one side, extraordinarily in expansion in all fields, and the energetic sector on the other side, basically blocked at the resource "oil". The author suggests that also in these 25 years the main problems may be reconducted to the geopolitics of oil. "Oil age", therefore? Considering that the readers would find this label too "materialistic", the author accepts to define the last quarter of the century as the "globalisation age", as it is common to do nowadays. But he tries to demonstrate that the main critical problems of "globalisation" bring us, eventually, to that dramatic limit to the growth of the world economy that is the stasis of energetic technologies and to the geopolitics problems that derive from it.