Sviluppo regionale e commercio internazionale nelle regioni italiane

The objective of this paper is to understand if the system of small and medium firms in traditional sectors still plays an important role in regional development and in international competitiveness of Italy. The new tendencies in international trade start from the evidence that very often factor distribution, the presence of firms and the industrial structure are not homogeneous within a single country. A second important point is that, as a consequence, regions do not show the same degree of involvement in international trade. This second point is influenced by sectoral specialization, by the regional level of development and sometimes also by the closeness to the foreign market. The paper focuses on international competitiveness of Italian regions in the period 1995-2005, in order to understand export specialization in the areas with a major concentration of industrial districts. The analysis has been conducted on 120 exporting sectors and the results show that regions with a high presence of districts have a higher degree of openness at international level, rather than other regions. Besides, “District regions” have a higher degree of specialization in more industrial sectors, and in particular in those of “Made in Italy”. Those regions seems also to have, in that same period, a higher degree of growth in GDP and export. This paper focuses on the importance of international specialization in Italian Regions in order to analyse the degree of openness in the last years and verify the kind of sectoral specialisation at international level. Italian regional trade is analysed by using exports database provided by Italian National Statistic Agency (ISTAT) and a cluster analysis based on some GDP and export in order to investigate the competitiveness at regional level and the weight of the single region in terms of market shares