Going abroad on regional shoulders: the role of spillovers on the composition of regional exports

In this paper we examine the existence of destination, industry, and generic export
spillovers at the regional level. The empirical analysis is conducted by examining data
on export activity of one hundred three Italian NUTS 3 regions, the ten industries with
the highest export values in the period 2004-2008, and the fifteen main countries of
destination of Italy’s exports. In particular we analyse the decision of export and subsequent
flow of trade and we aim to identify the source and quantify the effect of
spillovers generated at the regional level by means of a selection-bias corrected panel
data model. In order to control for the different territorial effects, three models are estimated.
The first one uses all the observations in the period, the second one is estimated
using only the regions located in the north-centre of Italy, and the last one is estimated
considering the data from the south of Italy. With the inclusion of controls, results
show a distinct effect of export industry, destination, and generic spillovers both
on the intensive and extensive margins of trade. Spillovers at the start of export activity
are stronger when specific by product while are stronger generically when analysing
the export flow.