The Italian balance of payments: an insight
Here for Italy I will quickly redo the analyzes done here for Germany.
This is the current account balance (millions of euros at current prices):
and, be careful: from these data it would emerge that we are no longer in a position of structural surplus (but there is, because growth in income implies growth in imports).
In fact, exports are decidedly above their historical trend, and so are imports, but this could depend on the evolution of prices: inflation has inflated all values. To avoid this optical illusion (actually, monetary illusion) we take exports and imports of national accounts goods and services, because they are available in real (ie inflation-adjusted) terms. The quarterly data (those at the highest frequency available) give us this picture:
and from this we can see that our exports of goods and services in real terms have returned to their historical trend, unlike the German ones, whose trend, as you will remember, was this:
Naturally this analysis has a mere descriptive value, and it should not be forgotten that the national accounts data, by construction, only consider the flows of goods and services (which in any case inform us on the state of the industry), while neglecting the income flows ( for example, the remuneration of capital or foreign labor). However, let's say that once the effects of inflation have been purged of the data, which, as mentioned, inflate them almost everywhere, in Germany we see something similar to a structural break, while in Italy we see something similar to the reabsorption of a transitory shock .
I'm waiting for your considerations: abstain from stadium fans, racist scum, mugginists, and the whole court of miracles that by "entering" politics we have alas attracted to this oasis of peace…
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/07/la-bilancia-dei-pagamenti-italiana-un.html on Tue, 04 Jul 2023 07:31:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.