Analyzing the Italian crises via industrial production index components evaluation

This paper aims at giving a better insight into the Italian crisis by focusing on the Industrial Production Index (IPI) series. By using filtering techniques, this series is split into its trend and cyclic components which highlight the structural and conjunctural contributions to the IPI evolution over time. The analysis carried out on the IPI series provides some evidences that the latest Italian economic turn-around is by nature cyclic instead of structural. This is in accordance with the latest Bank of Italy’s diagnosis of the GDP in relation to economic cycle effects. This also confirms the structural nature of the Italian crisis, corroborating the conjecture that Italian growth is developing less favorably than previously supposed.