La Proiezione Internazionale dell'Italia

Fabrizio Onida ()

No 156, KITeS Working Papers from KITeS, Centre for Knowledge, Internationalization and Technology Studies, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy

Abstract: Despite a declining trend in its world export market share since the beginning of the 90s, Italy is still today the world’s 7th exporter and importer, 7th as share of world GDP, 25th in the ranking of world per capita incomes in PPP terms. However Italy’s potential growth of output and productivity is dragged by its quite anomalous industrial structure and patterns of trade: a very high relative share of manufacturing firms with less than 50-100 employees and corresponding very low share of large firms at the opposite end of size distribution; a genuine weakness in most scale intensive and high-tech industries. Italy’s remarkable competitive advantages in top quality traditional consumer goods (personal care, housing) and in many segments of intermediate and producer durable goods (mechanical engineering, electrical and non electrical) are supported by a substantial amount of product and process innovation. But these patterns of output specialisation are increasingly inadequate to assure creation and training of high-skill jobs, propensity to invest in R&D-based innovation (less exposed to imitation by low-cost countries in their catching-up development process), capacity to invest in durable brandnames and robust worldwide distributive networks, ability to compete with multinational strategies and oligopolistic rivalry.

Keywords: Italy; Trade; International competitiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2004-07, Revised 2004-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.unibocconi.it/pub/RePEc/cri/papers/WP156Onida.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.unibocconi.it: No such host is known.

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:cri:cespri:wp156

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
E G E A - via R. Sarfatti, 25 - 20136 Milano -Italy

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KITeS Working Papers from KITeS, Centre for Knowledge, Internationalization and Technology Studies, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy via Sarfatti, 25 - 20136 Milano - Italy.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Valerio Sterzi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).