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This paper provides new evidence on reshoring and plant closures ex-ploiting a novel dataset of Italian multinational firms surveyed throughout 2020 and 2021, the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. We find that Covid-19 did not spur large waves of reshoring nor plant closures. Even though the pandemic has caused severe losses to firms, including multinationals, most did not stop foreign production nor are willing to do so in the near future. Furthermore, they maintained existing suppliers. Tariffs and trade policy uncertainty, on the other hand, are more likely to induce reshoring and plant closures. This evidence is consistent with a simple multi-period model, illustrating how offshoring, on the one side, and reshoring or plant closures, on the other side, are asymmetric in important ways. In the presence of sunk costs, reshoring and plant closures require sufficiently large and permanent shocks to demand, trade and foreign production costs to induce behavioural changes. Covid-19 was a major shock, but it was mostly perceived as temporary, while persistent trade policy un-certainty, especially if combined with other shocks, might induce firms to revise their internationalization strategies.

This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization on local labour markets in Ethiopia, with a focus on the gender dimension of employment. By exploiting rich micro-level data on Ethiopian workers, we evaluate the effect of the Ethiopian trade reforms on the changes and composition of employment, adopting as unit of analysis Ethiopian districts. We find that districts more exposed to trade liberalization experienced reductions in their employment levels, especially in female employment. We also show that reductions in (agricultural) input tariffs triggers a process of sectoral reallocation from agriculture to services and that this process is particularly pronounced for women. This in turns contributes to increase sectoral segregation.

I processi di frammentazione internazionale della produzione, a cui si può ricollegare il rapido aumento del rapporto tra commercio internazionale e Pil mondiale, rappresentano uno dei cambiamenti più importanti nell’economia globale dalla metà degli anni ottanta. Agenzia-ICE ha realizzato un'approfondita analisi per spiegare questo fenomeno e presentare la posizione dell'Italia.