LIGURIA - Economy
Private business must invest in technology
The main grounds for concern come from the industrial sector, which has gone through radical technological change and retrenchment, partly as a result of the serious crisis among large public companies.
However, after the crisis of the large State owned industrial groups and a long period of de-industrialisation, the trend might be now reversed. Private industry in Liguria has recently made significant advances and is becoming competitive, even on the foreign markets. Interestingly, some of these private industrial groups are engaged in hi-tech sectors (especially electronics).
The advanced branches of the services sector (transport, consultancy, etc.) have the necessary resources and skills to operate independently and successfully on the international markets.
An economic structure based on services
Liguria's contribution to the gross value added of Italy was 3% in 2000, while its population is nearly 2.8% of the total. Per capita GDP in Liguria is slightly above the national average.
Ligurian agriculture has increased its specialisation pattern in high-quality products (flowers, wine, olive oil) and has thus managed to maintain the gross value-added per worker at a level much higher than the national average (the difference was about 42% in 1999).
Although industry has become scaled down, it has turned towards a widely diversified range of high-quality and high-tech products (food, shipbuilding, electrical engineering and electronics, petrochemicals, aerospace etc.). In this way it manages to achieve a per capita gross value-added which is close to that of the Italian industry as a whole in 1999.
In the services sector, the gross value-added per worker in Liguria is 4% above the national average. This is due to the increasing diffusion of modern technologies, particularly in commerce and tourism.
A good motorways network (376 km in 2000) makes communications with the border regions relatively easy. The main motorway is located along the coastline, connecting the main ports of Nice (in France), Savona, Genoa and La Spezia. The number of passenger cars per 1000 inhabitants (524 in 2001) is below the national average (584).
In average, about 17 million tones of cargo are shipped from the main ports of the region and about 57 million tonnes enter the region (1999 data). The main destinations for the cargo-passenger traffic are Sicilia, Sardegna, Bastia, Corsica, Barcelona and Canarias.
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