Beneath the Surface: Investigating Industry Heterogeneity in Italy’s Goods Export Market Share Performance

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.