Measuring and Exploring Regional Trade Resilience in Italy During Different Crises

Trade growth and resilience show variations within the regions of a country during different recessionary periods. Similarly, the main determinants of trade capacity also register spatial differences. We use novel panel-time series data covering almost three decades and combine resilience indexes and heterogeneous coefficient models to study trade performance and resilience across the Italian regions. We find heterogeneous impact of different crises on trade and crisis-specific effects, together with sector- specific differences. We provide explanations for such differences based on the role of the EU cohesion policy, trade linkages and specialization. Policy implications are finally discussed.