The drivers of Italian exports and product market entry: 1862–1913

Abstract

Between its unification and WWI, Italy’s changing export composition echoed its economic transformation. In this paper, I decompose Italian export growth in its margins and then analyze the determinants of Italian exports and product market entry (and exit). To do so, I use two different databases (aggregate and product-level bilateral trade data) and methodologies (gravity and logit models). Besides confirming some well-known empirical and historical facts for the Italian case (gravity variables hold; trade follows a Heckscher–Olhin pattern), the regression results offer a new perspective on two distinctive features of its history: trade policy and emigration. These two factors are positively associated with Italian exports and product market entry. These findings also have additional implications for the role of emigration on the course of the Italian economy: accounting for the trade channel, its overall effect may be larger than previously thought.

El comportamiento de la industria española en los mercados internacionales (1890-1913)

“…connection between exports and emigration. For example, in the Italian case, emigration played an important role in the demand for national products (Timini 2020). For North America, immigration was also important for the import of finished and differentiated goods (Dunley and Hutchinston 1999).…”