The industry of the South presents, to an aggravated extent, the weaknesses typical of the national industry, characterized by the small size of the enterprises, the reduced weight of the high-tech sectors, the scarce internationalization and the weak innovative activity of the enterprises.
Although this context has accentuated the repercussions of the global economic crisis on the economy of the South, which is experiencing serious difficulties, the latest publication from the Bank of Italy outlines a more varied picture of the situation, revealing the winners and losers of the competitive challenge.
In fact, with the economic crisis that began in 2008, the decline of southern industry compared to the rest of the country was very uneven, presenting strong and increased territorial and sectoral heterogeneities.
Among the various industrial sectors, the trend of which can be seen up to 2010, the smallest drops in value added (less than 10 per cent) are found in the non-manufacturing sectors (extractive and energy industries) and in the food sector.
Among the regional territories, the smallest reductions, again in terms of added value, were recorded in Abruzzo, Molise, Puglia and Calabria, with decreases between 2007 and 2011 of less than 14 per cent; in Campania and Sardinia the reduction was at least 20 per cent.
Distinguishing by company size class, four years after the start of the crisis the smallest companies, mainly oriented towards internal demand, suffered severely in terms of turnover, maintaining, as usual, profitability levels clearly lower than those of the rest of the Village.
The large southern companies have shown greater stability in turnover but profitability, which in the early XNUMXs was not dissimilar to that of companies of the same size in the Center and North, has dropped to very low levels, close to those of small companies in the South.
However, signs of industrial vitality are not absent, and are more widespread in industrial agglomerations. The analyzes updated to 2011 show that in Southern Italy belonging to an agglomeration area continues to produce a positive effect on the performance of companies, at least in terms of propensity to export and productivity.
While for Italy as a whole we observe the progressive disappearance of the advantage of joining a system of enterprises, the econometric exercise referring only to the southern territory shows an incipient agglomerative advantage right from the eve of the crisis.
The mere location in an agglomeration would have helped to curb the decline in productivity of southern industry, compared to the average for the area, perhaps thanks to the differential in the propensity to export between agglomerated and non-agglomerated systems, more intense in the South than in the rest of the village.
However, the same phenomenon does not emerge if we discriminate between the industrial districts surveyed by Istat rather than between agglomerations. Presumably this is because the district qualification excludes a large part of the enterprise systems characterized by a high average size of the enterprises. In fact, it is probable that the presence of large companies favors the southern propensity to export compared to the average of the area, more than it does in the rest of the country, where some contextual factors (for example, the best infrastructural endowment) make the easier access to foreign markets even for small companies.
The area of greatest vitality counts above all on the contribution of the food sector (4 provinces: Naples, Bari, Salerno, Palermo) and of the only high-tech sector, the aerospace sector (concentrated above all in Naples).
However, these areas represent only a fifth of the manufacturing workers in the South.
To complete the picture, within the various sectors, the individual local systems have sometimes shown heterogeneous trends. While the Lecce footwear industry lost about two-thirds of its exports between 2007 and 2011, the Caserta and Neapolitan ones have largely exceeded their pre-crisis levels. The sale of parts and accessories for motor vehicles abroad has almost halved in Melfi, but has grown by a fifth in Bari. Aeronautical exports have partly moved from Campania to Puglia.
The high variation in performance observed is probably due to the variety of company strategies adopted to react to the crisis and to the varying success of these initiatives. This dynamic shows how even the southern agglomerations are involved in the tiring and discontinuous process of transformation imposed by the new production paradigms of the global era.
Attachments: Bank of Italy: southern industry and the crisis
