Foreign Trade of Italian Regions between Post-pandemic Recovery and Perspectives of Global Recession

The pandemic crisis, the turmoil deriving from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis and the rising inflation had significant adverse impacts on global trade. The relevance of this sector for Italian economy requires a significant effort in the expenditure of the available resources for supporting regional export. Among the available instruments, a fundamental role might be played by resources related to Cohesion Policy, if they are exploited for increasing the competitiveness of firms located in the concerned areas. Therefore, moving from the reconstruction of the current trends of regional export and exploiting econometric techniques, useful to define the elasticity coefficients of export to the expenditure of cohesion funds, different scenarios have been built. Results show that, during the Great Recession, funds of the 2007-2013 Cohesion Policy were fundamental for sustain regional export. The scenarios we built show that this might be possible in the context of the next Cohesion Policy programming cycle, especially in a context of weak and uncertain growth, as that forecast for the next years. Moreover, results show that, despite suffering from a relative marginality in the share of export compared with other areas of the country, Mezzogiorno regions might benefit from a proper implementation of investments funded through the 2021-2027 programming cycles more than other areas of the country, in terms of export growth.