There is a well-known phrase by historian Carlo Maria Cipolla that says: "Italians have been accustomed since the Middle Ages to producing beautiful things that are liked and therefore sold outside their borders". Going on the internet, however, the phrase is integrated with the reference to the production that takes place "in the shadow of the bell towers".

Beyond the purity of the quotation, this addition is symptomatic of the fact that a large part of the exports of Made in Italy goods has been the fruit of specialized local production systems in which cooperation and competition coexist, the so-called industrial districts, so well described in their socio-economic characteristics by Giacomo Becattini, that at the end of the 1990s Becattini himself published a volume with the emblematic title: "Distretti industriali e made in Italy. Le basi reali del rinnovamento italiano".

These were the years in which a "district effect" on our exports was discussed, highlighted by a Bank of Italy survey coordinated by the current Director General Luigi Federico Signorini. More recently, the territorial effects on exports have been measured by various contributions, including that of Marco Pini, senior economist at the Centro Studi Guglielmo Tagliacarne, who verified the link between a mix of socio-territorial factors and the development of exports.

In the meantime, district systems have evolved, complex supply chain interactions have been created starting from territorial matrices. Then came Covid, which gave a very bad setback to international trade. In April 2020 the expectations for the end of the year were very pessimistic, but the rebound after June has definitely changed the tone, so today the situation is optimistic and for the current year the World Trade Organization (WTO) forecasts a growth of almost 11% compared to 8% estimated last March, and a continuation of growth of 4.7% for 2022.

Our companies are taking advantage of this scenario: in the first eight months of 2021, exports increased by more than 22% and a growth path was resumed even compared to 2019, so much so that the most accredited evaluations speak at the end of the year of a value exceeding 500 billion euros, a ceiling never reached!

But what is happening for district economies? Considered by many an outdated and romantic form of the past these local systems are showing renewed activism. For the latest Monitor-districts of Intesa-San Paolo in the first half of 2021 the export of these areas recorded a growth of almost 28% compared to the same period in 2020, and about one percentage point more than in the first half of 2019. It is a very good result even considering that several districts have a strong specialization in the fashion sector, one of those that suffered most from the pandemic by losing almost 20% of exports overall in 2020. The recovery is widespread in all territories: out of a total of 158 districts monitored by the research, 101 in the second quarter are already above 2019 levels.

The districts are characterized by a complex interweaving of subcontracting relationships articulated in wider supply chains. Last year's lockdown disrupted these flows. The overall effects were very strong, to the point that recent evaluations by the Centro Studi Tagliacarne on provincial added value tell us that the provinces in which the lockdowns were most consistent lost the most in terms of product. Many of these provinces have a strong district presence. But at the same time, this same presence has allowed for a greater ability to react: according to a composite indicator, elaborated by the same Study Center, in the first semester of 2021, many provinces with the greatest effect of productive lockdown show the best recovery performance, a rebound (and not only) largely attributable to good performance on international markets.

The pandemic has also had the effect of shortening the subcontracting chains.

One of the strenghts of the district systems is to have more short supply chains, in other terms the subcontracting of proximity remains a competitive factor in the districts: the suppliers are much closer to the principals than elsewhere (on average 116 km vs 157), if we add that the enterprises of the districts are much more territorially rooted and generally more attentive to the two challenges green and digital, it emerges many elements to believe that, even after many years, the district systems, for that their mixture of economic and social components, continue to have important competitive factors for the future.

"Nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed", the fundamental postulate of Lavoiser's physics seems to apply also to district systems where, even if there is no longer the shadow of bell towers, productions continue to be organized and "liked and sold outside the borders", demonstrating that the district formula, updated with the implications of supply chain, is a competitive modality still current for our territorial systems, which has evolved and strengthened and therefore requires a new and more current attention from the development policies, also in the Recovery Plan scenario.

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Gaetano Fausto Esposito is Director General of the Study Center of the Chambers of Commerce "Guglielmo Tagliacarne" and professor of Political Economy at the Universitas mercatorum. Author of numerous essays and books on the topics of financial economics and development, industrial economics and internationalization processes of enterprises. He is currently working on the role of fiduciary processes in economic development and on the economics of institutional sustainability. He recently published Lockdown/Upside down. Società ed economia globali in ripartenza, Fralerighe, and Come un salmone che risale la corrente. Elzeviri per un capitalismo globale più umano, Bruno Mondadori.