Abstracts Economics

The Export Fitness of Italian Regions: an Evolutionary and Complexity Approach

by FEDERICO MUSU

Evolutionary Economics is characterised by a long-lasting tradition of studies concerned with economic change and its sources. In particular the problem of interrelation between technological change and economic change has been at the foundation of Evolutionary analysis. For this reason a number of studies ascribable to this theoretical paradigm has been concerned on the definition and nature of technology and the way in which such technology relates to the forms of productive and organisational knowledge embedded in economic organisations. The learning properties of these entities relate to the local properties of their scientific and operational knowledge base. Organisational knowledge bases are strongly characterised by the technological regime of the different product sectors in which they operate, implying differentials in the technological opportunities available for each firm within different industries. Such differences in the technological features implies different rates of growth of industries and sectors and are reflected in the income growth rates of countries which produce them. The metrics developed within the Economic Complexity approach, relying on a huge amount of highly granular export data are able to identify the idiosyncratic patterns of different countries' quality of export diversification and the relation to their overall export competitiveness. The Economic Complexity approach, has proved useful also to study the patterns of regional export competitiveness. We apply the Economic Complexity methods to disentangle patterns of the Italian regional competitiveness on the basis of the quality of diversification of their product exports. To do that we classify products based on the Pavitt Taxonomy. In the end, we map the shifting composition of Pavitt Taxonomy within the export structure of the regions, into the revealed up-ward or down-ward trends of regional export competitiveness.