The production levels achieved in the first nine months of 2015 place Italian manufacturing still far from pre-crisis values: compared to the average value of manufacturing production in 2008, today Italian companies produce about 20% less. The sectors that still show the greatest difficulties are those with a lower propensity to export and therefore more penalized by the fall in domestic demand that characterized the two recessions that took place starting from the second quarter of 2008. In Europe, too, industrial production has resumed growing very slowlyand with diverging trends across countries. In the EU 28 in September 2015 there were only 11 countries with manufacturing production values equal to or higher than the pre-crisis values. In a few cases, however, the 2008 values were substantially exceeded: the phenomenon occurred above all in Poland and Romania (+34% compared to the 2008 value), Slovakia (+29%) and Hungary (+15%).
Since 2000 the market share of some Eastern European countries has gradually increased: today the production of Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic together is higher than that of Spain and has grown at the expense of all the main producers except Germany, which increased its share of European manufacturing production by 4,4 points over the same period. In 2014, according to Confindustria estimates, Italy was in eighth place in the world in terms of value of manufacturing production valued at current prices and exchange rates. The ranking is led by China, which with a share of 32,8% is far behind the United States (14,2%), Japan (6,2%) and Germany (5,3%). Overall, the Bric countries' share of world production has exceeded 40%, a value similar to that of the advanced countries and equal to their demographic weight. However, the rise of emerging countries, and above all of the Bric group in the manufacturing field, seems to have come to an end.
Attachments: Focus no. 41 – 27 November 2015.pdf
