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What gets built inside the zones is not the same, either. Poland's are heavy on automotive, rubber and plastics, and electrical equipment, with German, Polish, Belgian, South Korean and Dutch money accounting for most of the stock.
FTZ News: Italy and Poland took different paths with special economic zones. The results show it. Poland ran 14 separate zones for two decades. Then in 2018 it opened the same tax relief to nearly the whole country under the Polish Investment Zone. Italy waited longer. In 2024 it folded its southern zones into one Single Special Economic Zone covering the Mezzogiorno, later stretched to Marche and Umbria. The two setups now look less alike than the shared label suggests.
What the numbers actually show
Scale is the clearest split. Poland's old zones still hold roughly 164 billion zlotys in cumulative capital and nearly 357,000 jobs as of the end of 2025, government figures show. The newer Investment Zone has handed out more than 3,700 support decisions since 2018, tied to about 154–167 billion zlotys in pledged investment and more than 55,000 promised jobs — a range reflecting slightly different snapshots in the government's own year-end and mid-year reporting, not a lack of precision on either end. In 2025 alone the zone managers signed off on 642–646 decisions worth 21.8–22 billion zlotys, with official releases themselves settling on slightly different totals for the same year. Italy's ZES Unica is younger: by early November 2026 it had issued 1,631 single authorizations linked to 10.5 billion euros in associated investments and roughly 28,000 expected jobs, according to the Department for the South's latest bulletin. Officials and research groups have pointed to wider multiplier effects, including induced and indirect activity, that push the total economic impact into the 50–60 billion euro range — a different category of number from Poland's pledged-capital totals, and not one that should be read against them directly.
What gets built
What gets built inside the zones is not the same, either. Poland's are heavy on automotive, rubber and plastics, and electrical equipment, with German, Polish, Belgian, South Korean and Dutch money accounting for most of the stock. Italy's authorizations lean toward agri-food, quality Made-in-Italy goods, automotive, electronics and tourism, and new greenfield plants make up a large share of the value; high-tech sectors such as aerospace and biotech remain thin on the ground in both countries.
Trade and markets
Trade is where both programs go quiet. Poland's overall exports tilt toward automotive parts, machinery and furniture; Italy's toward machinery, pharmaceuticals, vehicles and food — but neither government breaks out how much of that actually moves through the zones, and neither publishes a destination breakdown for what the zones produce, so the export and import profile of the zones specifically has to be inferred from national trade data rather than read directly off either program's books.
How the incentives work
Incentives diverge in their own way. Poland offers corporate-income-tax exemptions whose intensity and duration depend on the region and the size of the firm, with maximum aid reaching 50 percent of eligible costs in the poorest areas against 15 to 25 percent in richer ones, running for a fixed period — typically 10 to 15 years — tied to the support decision; permits issued under the old, pre-2018 zone system expire at the end of 2026. Italy's ZES Unica pairs a single authorization that speeds up permitting with tax credits on new investment, running up to high double-digit percentages in some cases, plus simplified procedures, though customs duty suspension is not the central lever in either country the way it is in classic free ports — both lean mainly on income-tax or investment-tax relief instead.
Where the output goes
Target markets track the industrial base more than they track any policy design: Polish zones feed European automotive and machinery supply chains, while Italian projects more often serve domestic and Mediterranean demand for food, tourism and light manufacturing.
Why the gap exists
The structural choices explain part of the gap, but not all of it. Poland's 2018 reform turned the whole country into eligible territory and locked in a large existing stock of plants built over two decades; Italy's 2024 reform is younger and still concentrated on the south. Poland's bigger numbers partly reflect that head start and a larger industrial platform to begin with, not just a better-designed program, while Italy's faster growth rate reflects a later start more than a stronger one. How many of the pledged projects in both countries actually get built and stay in operation will decide whether the two approaches start to look more alike or keep drifting apart./.
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