After the collapse in the first quarter of the year (-24.2%), Sardinia's exports are taking off again, recording a +18.8% in the second quarter of the year, the best performance of the period among all the Italian regions.

This is what Istat reports in its latest survey on foreign trade.

In the second quarter of 2024, compared to the previous quarter, exports were almost stationary for the North-West (+0.2%) and the North-East (+0.1%), increasing for the Center (+1.1%) and decreasing for the South and Islands (-3.6%). But the data for the South, added by the Institute of Statistics, provides "an important contribution from the increase in sales of refining products from Sardinia" , together with those of pharmaceutical products from Campania.

Overall, Istat highlights, in the period January-June 2024, the annual decrease in national exports in value (-1.1%) is the result of different territorial dynamics: the North-West (-3.5%), the Center (-2.3%) and the North-East (-1.4%) recorded a decline in sales abroad, while a marked growth in exports was recorded for the Islands (+7.3%) and a more modest increase for the South (+1.9%).

At a national level, the report notes, «in the first six months of 2024, the largest trend declines in exports concern Marche (-41.3%), Basilicata (-40.9%) and Liguria (-26.3%) », while the «most dynamic» regions are Sardinia, Calabria (+18.0%), Molise (+14.2%), Campania (+8.8%) and Tuscany (+8.7%).

Going into even more detail, in the first half of the year the largest negative contributions to the annual decline in national exports came from the contraction in sales of the Marche region to China (-94.9%) and Belgium (-55.8%), Tuscany to Switzerland (-64.8%), Liguria to the United States (-80.5%) and Lombardy to Germany (-6.0%), the United States (-5.7%) and France (-5.3%).