Is international openness associated with faster economic growth? This paper tries to establish the effect of technology and market opening on labour productivity in Italy. The simple model developed in this paper shows that more open economies have higher rate of technical progress, higher productivity and higher GDP. The model assumes that there are two sources of technical progress growth: a domestic source, associated with innovation (i.e. R&D) and an international one, related to the rate at which the country is able to imitate technological progress originated in the leading innovating nations. According to this model in Italy the internationalisation process, due to the excess of sheltered sectors over the exposed ones, may cause, on average, a lowering of the Italian productivity.