For Italy, which aims to eliminate its budget deficit by 2013, there is another balance, equally virtuous, which could be achieved around, if not before, that date. Within our exports, it is the balance between the share of extra-EU sales with those made to European Union countries. Trend and cyclical data tell us that we are moving in this direction. In the first seven months of the year, Italy's extra-EU exports reached 96 billion euro against 127 for intra-EU sales. In August – data on EU exports will be available on 14 October – exports outside the European Union rose to 108 billion with a growth rate over the corresponding period of 2010 of no less than 16,5 percentage points. In a cyclical panorama that bemoans many shadows, the figure for non-European sales represents a powerful beacon. In a scenario in which the weakness of incomes, market uncertainties and the effects of fiscal maneuvers will inevitably have repercussions for some time on the tone of domestic demand, the solid growth of extra-EU exports will offer a safe anchor and will write a new page in the Italian tradition of export-led growth, driven by exports. The novelty of this further step in our economic history will be that, increasingly, the turnover to be sought across the border will not be outside the doorstep, but much, much further away.
Italian exports run on the most distant markets. This is demonstrated by sales in China which, in the first eight months of 2011, increased by just under twenty percent. Even stronger are the rates of expansion of exports to Turkey, Latin America, Russia, South-East Asia and India. With the exception of Switzerland – where Italian exports run mainly thanks to the effects of the drastic revaluation of the franc against the euro – the growth of Italian exports to the non-EU world is a reflection of the solid trajectories of economic development that the new “ growth economies” have traveled so far. The question is whether the growth of the New World will continue at the same pace. The judgment expressed in this regard in the latest projections released by the International Monetary Fund is comforting. In 2012, China's GDP will grow by nine percentage points, with only a few tenths of a reduction compared to the result estimated for this year. A completely limited and, above all, temporary slowdown will also occur in India and in many other "emerging" economies. Assessed over the medium term, the effect of the Euro-American debt crisis on the new economies could prove to be limited.
Taking the 2006 figure to one hundred, in 2016 China's real gross domestic product will reach 259. The same exercise, carried out on the IMF projections last April, confirmed the growth of Chinese GDP in 2016 at 260. a point between the two profiles gives us the measure of how our Ptolemaic habit of confining the center of the world economy to the combination of the Euro area and the United States prevents us from seeing that, fortunately, the locomotive of global expansion has moved somewhere else. There is a half of the world where the economic slowdown is managed rather than suffered. And where the cross between the structural trends of expansion of demographics, technology and consumption will open further spaces for imports of these new markets from the Old World.
Will we be able to fully grasp these spaces? In 2010, China moved from eleventh to eighth place among Italian export customers. Brazil, in just twelve months, moved from twenty-fourth to seventeenth position. Turkey from fourteenth to twelfth. Looking at a few sectors, in the first eight months of 2011 Italian sales of mechanics grew by 16 percent to the world and by 32 percent in Turkey. Italian clothing exports increased by 12 percent in the world and by 42 percent in China. Alongside the sectors, signs of great interest come from the territories. This is the case, among others, of Emilia Romagna and, in particular, of the province of Bologna. In Bologna in 2010, China became the fourth provincial export market with a share of about six percentage points, double the regional figure and three times the share that China holds on national exports nationwide. This is thanks to an increase in exports from Bologna to China which in 2010 exceeded sixty percentage points. And, after China, exports from Bologna grew by 35 percent to Turkey and 26 percent to India.
The encouraging examples could continue. We are moving in the right direction. We need to speed up, do more, because everyone in the Old World today knows that the decisive challenge is being played out on the new markets. A challenge that requires our companies to quickly recover the competitiveness gaps accumulated in recent years. Some help could come from the ongoing repositioning of the euro exchange rate to quotations more consistent with the growth differentials between areas and countries. It is not enough. Reducing the tax wedge weighing on the competitiveness of exporters could give a sure return in terms of growth of gross domestic product. An authoritative proposal recently formulated observes how, in a context of overall recomposition of the tax levy, lightening the non-pension contribution rates which now account for XNUMX per cent of the labor cost borne by businesses would lead to an increase in GDP of just under half a percentage point over a three-year period. It would be an important "quid pluris", to help the competitiveness of Italian exports and keep our growth linked to the new locomotives of development.
