Exploring the recent resilience of Italy's goods exports: Competitiveness, energy intensity and supply bottlenecks

Simona Giglioli () and Claire Giordano
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Simona Giglioli: Bank of Italy

No 785, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: We explore three possible explanations of the recent resilience of Italy's foreign sales in comparison with the other three main euro-area economies, namely price-competitiveness dynamics, developments in energy-intensive (EI) and non-energy-intensive (NEI) manufacturing sectors, the impact of global supply bottlenecks. Price-competitiveness trends were particularly favourable in Italy in 2022. Furthermore, the composition of Italy’s manufacturing exports was not strongly tilted towards EI sectors and the decline in EI foreign sales was relatively small, leading to a more limited negative contribution of these industries to aggregate export growth compared with Germany. Finally, according to cross-country firm survey data, manufacturing in Italy was significantly less affected by shortages of materials and equipment than in the other three countries. A standard regression analysis of goods exports trends confirms that the above factors contributed to explaining Italy's strong performance in 2022.

Keywords: goods exports; price competitiveness; energy intensity; supply bottlenecks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F01 F10 Q41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-ene and nep-int
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_785_23

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