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No. 7 - Italian foreign trade in the 1960s: International and technological specialization

The paper traces the evolution of Italian trade specialization in the 1960s in comparison with the other main OECD countries. Italy’s share of world exports increased considerably, while the composition of manufacturing exports changed with the broader transformation of the economy into a typically industrial one. However, as regards the technological characteristics of the goods exported (Pavitt technological categories), Italy’s model of specialization showed limited dynamism and did not converge on those of the more advanced countries. There was only one important change: the country’s export success with “specialized-suppliers” goods of mid-to-high innovative content produced mainly by small and medium-sized firms. Italy’s backwardness in science-based and scale-intensive production emerges, as well as its leadership in the supplier-dominated class of traditional industrial products. The 1960s thus constituted a crucial step in the emergence of the type of trade specialization that would prevail in subsequent decades.