Beneath the surface: investigating industry heterogeneity in Italy’s goods export market share performance

Stefano Federico and Claire Giordano

No 641, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Exploiting several highly granular datasets, we compute Italy's goods export market shares at a 5-digit sector of economic activity level over 2010–19 to identify the "market-share gainer" and "loser" sectors in world markets over the past decade, and "stable" sectors, identified residually. We next assess the main structural characteristics, both domestic and external, of these categories of sectors. Finally, we analyse Italy's 5-digit goods export developments in 2020 in order to verify the performance of the various sector groupings during the Covid-19 pandemic. Italy's gainers are mainly agri-food products, the fashion industry and pharmaceuticals, whereas losers are more heterogeneous across macro-sectors; around 40 per cent of industries are classified as stable, consistently with the resilience of Italy's aggregate world market share. Gainers are characterized by significantly lower competition from both China and Central-Eastern Europe and by higher quality positioning than losers; they are also more productive, more intensely involved in GVCs and display a higher share of young and of female workers. On average, market-share gainers fared relatively better than the other industries in 2020, albeit only slightly.

Keywords: Export market shares; world goods trade; structural characteristics; Covid-19 pandemic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2021-0641/QEF_641_21.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_641_21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().