IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdi/opques/qef_519_19.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Italy’s international trade in services: a story of missed growth?

Author

Listed:
  • Alessandro Moro

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Enrico Tosti

    (Bank of Italy)

Abstract

The paper analyses the trend in Italy’s trade in services over the last twenty years, showing a low growth in relation to its potential demand and in comparison with the main euro-area countries. The delay accumulated by Italy’s exports of services from 1999 to 2015 was highly significant and only in the subsequent period was there a recovery. The analysis by typology shows that services other than travel and transport are the aggregate with the worst performance compared with a stronger trend at global level; from a geographical point of view, sales outside the EMU have displayed the most negative contribution. Using firm-level microdata, it is possible to examine the main determinants of Italian service exports, highlighting the negative role of the scarcity of medium-sized and large companies, the low productivity and the limited internationalization of the services sector; the recovery recorded in the three years 2016-18 was driven by large foreign-controlled companies.

Suggested Citation

  • Alessandro Moro & Enrico Tosti, 2019. "Italy’s international trade in services: a story of missed growth?," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 519, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
  • Handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_519_19
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2019-0519/QEF_519_19.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alessandro Moro & Enrico Tosti, 2020. "The determinants of service export behaviour in Italian non-financial firms," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 577, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    2. Nadia Accoto & Stefano Federico & Giacomo Oddo, 2023. "Trade in services related to intangibles and the profit shifting hypothesis," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 1414, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    International trade in services; mirror statistics; foreign demand; firm-level data;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • L80 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_519_19. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdigvit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.