Antitrust Policy and National Growth: Some Evidence from Italy

Antitrust problems affecting markets for intermediate goods or services raise the input costs of firms operating in the downstream sectors, which often face tough international competition. Such firms lose market shares, thus worsening the economic performance of the country. We try to document the importance of this link between competition problems and growth by analysing Italian sectoral data. We find that sectors which depend more heavily on inputs and services produced in sectors suffering from competition problems perform worse in terms of net exports, export growth and output growth.