Between January and June of this year, Italian exports grew by 8%, driven by robust demand from countries outside the European Union. Sales in China increased by 28% and those in the United States by almost 10%. The recovery also affected the other emerging economies, with a return to growth in exports Russia e Turkey. The Italian economy benefits from the improved international context, which is favoring a gradual acceleration of world trade.
Despite this favorable trend, the recovery of the Italian economy mainly reflects the renewed support of domestic demand, while the contribution of net exports remains negative, penalized by the strong growth of importsthe. Between the first quarter of 2013 and the second quarter of 2017, exports increased by 15,5% in real terms; the growth of imports, on the other hand, approached 20%, helping to explain the only 3,4 percentage points gained by the GDP.
Since the outbreak of the crisis, Italian imports of consumer goods have increased from 80 to over 110 billion euros. Purchases from abroad have come to cover about 23% of the total consumption of household goods, 5 percentage points more than in 2008 and 9 more than in 2000, absorbing about 15% of expenditure on food products and 30% of that for clothing and footwear.
The greater weight of imports also affects business activity. Between 2013 and 2016, foreign purchases of machinery increased by 25%, reaching 28 billion euros and covering about a third of total investments. Furthermore, imports of intermediate goods increased, signaling the growing weight of foreign countries in supplying the necessary inputs to the domestic production process.
Several factors explain the growing importance of imports. In some industries, a long phase of deindustrialization led to the transfer abroad of entire phases of the production process, making recourse to purchases from abroad almost an obligatory choice. In recent years, however, the Italian manufacturing system also seems to have lost competitiveness: between 2005 and 2016, domestic producer prices grew by 13%, while the increase in import prices stopped at 2%, representing a greater convenience to buy from abroad rather than produce internally.
