The Evolution of World Export Sophistication and the Italian Trade Anomaly

This work provides an empirical assessment of the sophistication level of the Italian international specialization pattern from 1980 to recent years. In particular we present an original analysis which explores the intertemporal co-evolution of the newly proposed PRODY index of export sophistication (Hausmann et al. 2005, 2007) with standard measures of revealed comparative advantage. We argue that the results of this exercise can shed light on the Italian "trade specialization anomaly".