There are at least four, and different, stories that tell the foreign trade results achieved by the Italian economy in 2012.
The first story is that of the trade balance, the difference between exports and imports. In perhaps the most difficult year since the Second World War, our economy has discovered that it is the country of two leftovers. The gap between the value of exports and that of imports is now added to the primary surplus of the public accounts. The 2012 foreign trade surplus amounts to about ten billion euros. It's not much, but the discontinuity is important. Last year, countries in macroeconomic conditions that were certainly better than ours continued to record trade deficits of the order of tens of billions of euros. This is the case of France and the United Kingdom. Obviously, not from Germany. But the German one, as we know, is a special case.
The second story is that of exports. If the gross domestic product is still maneuvering in reverse, exports are stubbornly looking forward. Between 2009 and 2012, Italian exports grew by a hundred billion. Italy's exports have kept pace. Indeed, it has done something even more since exports have increased in Italy as much as in a country like France whose GDP exceeds ours by a good twenty percent. The point is, however, another. In the global arena, it is not companies alone that compete, but economic systems. In this context, the stability of Italian exports has something miraculous. Someone has defined Italian exporters as "mad for Italy", madmen who continue to get busy despite the many domestic handicaps suffered by our entrepreneurs: from twelve tax wedge points more than the OECD average to the costs imposed by a country where the debts still not liquidated by the public administrations have the dimension of the budget maneuvers approved to restore the public finances over a four-year period. The burden of internal inefficiencies weighs on the competitiveness and prospects of Italian exports. The symptoms of fatigue are unfortunately evident in the most recent dynamics. Important signs of deceleration are also emerging on the non-EU markets where Italian sales increased by fifty percent in the three-year period 2009-2012 and where today 46 percent of our exports are concentrated.
The third story to tell concerns imports. In 2012, the value of Italian imports dropped by about six percentage points. From a statistical point of view, the drop in imports contains the drop in GDP. But this is only half good news. The reduction in purchases from abroad is, in fact, the other side of two phenomena called impoverishment and deindustrialization. The loss of work and the reduction in the purchasing power of households translates into a compression of imports. It is the classic mechanism of an adjustment "à la Hume" of an imbalance in the external accounts. A painful path, but not sufficient since impoverishment does not automatically imply a lasting recovery of competitiveness. The relative aspect of deindustrialization can be read in the vertical reduction of imports of capital goods and intermediate goods. The fact of importing less machinery and less semi-finished products is the correlate of a slimming industrial system. The risk of being gradually marginalized in the network of the great planetary "bazaar economy" is also the content of the fourth story told by the numbers of our foreign trade: that of the value of trade, i.e. the sum of exports and imports which in 2012 turned downward again.
Quite rightly, it has been observed from many quarters that a growth model based on exports alone is not enough, either at the world level or for a single country. A new paradigm is needed, played on the balanced expansion of both stakes of foreign trade. The increase in exports needs the vitality of imports to last over time. This is true for every single economy and at the international level, where it seems difficult to find a new global net buyer of imports to take over the role so long played by the United States.
For Italy, the transition is extremely delicate. The stories written in 2012 by the figures of our exchange tell of lights as well as shadows. It is necessary to remain close to the five per cent of Italian companies that export and to the five per thousand companies which, through controlled subsidiaries abroad, deal with an all-round internationalization issue and keep the country-system connected to the global network of competition . However, two hundred thousand exporters and twenty thousand internationalized companies are not enough to set in motion a sustainable development project for the future of twenty million families. This will require more than foreign trade.
