A New Approach to Measure Italian Regional Trade Flows with Administrative Micro Firm-Level Data

In this paper, we present a novel approach to measure domestic bilateral trade flows in intermediate and final consumption in the Italian regions. We reconstruct regional trade flows in final consumption by using administrative data from tax returns that limit the issues of survey-based measures. We also investigate the main determinants of domestic regional trade flows in Italy by adopting a spatial gravity modeling framework that allows for the inclusion of multiple spatial dependence effects. Moreover, we provide evidence of the presence of geographical heterogeneity and a specific focus on trade flows in the manufacturing sector. Our findings, which are robust to alternative specifications, suggest that the introduction of different sources of spatial dependence is relevant to understand the occurrence of multiple types of network effects when considering origin, destination, and origin–destination linkages in trade flows. We also document regional differences in the spatial concentration of trade flows in intermediate and final consumption. Finally, we discuss the main implications and future avenues of inquiry of our research.