The article entitled 'An overview of Italy's external trade in Covid-19-related goods', written by researchers from the Bank of Italy, is now online.
This note investigates the dynamics and composition of Italy's external trade flows in COVID goods, i.e. goods that are employed, among their other uses, for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of COVID-19, based on a novel 8-digit product-level dataset published by Eurostat. In 2020 imports of COVID-19 goods grew strongly, mostly owing to the purchases of protective face masks from China, while exports declined, shaving off 0.3 percentage points from Italy's current account balance as a ratio to GDP, in line with the other main euro-area countries. In the first semester of 2021, Italy's COVID-19 exports moderately rebounded. Imports continued to increase, stimulated by vaccine transactions, albeit at a significantly lower rate than in 2020 thanks to the drop in purchases of face masks from abroad.
