The duties wanted by the new US administration led by Donald Trump could penalize Sardinia's exports not only for what concerns pecorino romano and dairy and agri-food products . In fact, petroleum refining products are also at risk of suffering.
The alarm was raised by Cgia di Mestre , according to which the new American protectionist policy will hit exports from the South in particular, and in particular those from the Island.
This is because, unlike the rest of the country, "almost all of the regions of the South have a low diversification of products sold in foreign markets. Therefore, if after steel, aluminum and their derivatives the USA - and, in turn, other countries in the world - were to decide to raise trade barriers to other goods, the negative effects on our production system could be greater in the territories where the economic dimension of exports is strongly conditioned by a few product sectors".
Cgia analyzed the first 10 product groups on the regional total of foreign sales : where the diversification index is lower, the more regional exports are diversified, thus resulting less sensitive to possible upheavals in international trade. Differently, the higher the incidence of the value of the first 10 exported products on total foreign sales, that territory appears to be more exposed to potential negative trends in international trade.
The region with the worst diversification index is Sardinia (95.6%), where exports of products deriving from petroleum refining dominate. They are followed by Molise (86.9%) - characterized by a particularly high weight of the sale of chemical products/plastics and rubber, motor vehicles and baked goods - and Sicily (85%), which has a strong vocation in the refining of petroleum products. In the South, only Puglia has a high level of diversification (49.8%), which places it in third place. With the exception of Puglia, the geographical areas theoretically least at risk are all in the North.
Lombardy (43%) is hypothetically the least at "risk". It is followed by Veneto (46.8), Puglia (49.8), Trentino Alto Adige (51.1), Emilia Romagna (53.9) and Piedmont (54.8).