Abstract

In an increasingly integrated world, the traditional criteria for measuring imports and exports are no longer able to highlight the changes and the new geo-economic scenarios. It is increasingly the case that an object is manufactured in a Country, but the component parts come from all over the world. To better understand and calculate commercial trades it is necessary, therefore, to change the approach and track the value added by each Country at any point in this process. If, instead of simply calculating the global flows of goods and services every time they pass the borders, we consider how each good or service is actually referable to each Country, the numbers on commercial trades change a lot. Measuring logistic value using a macroeconomic approach, backed by the availability of quantitative data drawing from the databases of WTO (World Trade Organization), OECD and other supranational institutions, allows to give better traceability to supply chains in value-added processes when globally completing and actively improving the output, a better representation of macro indicators such as GDP, and a more accurate and balanced global representation of the real economy in terms of logistic value across and within Countries as in the case of South and Central-North Italy. However, both micro approach, expressing the logistic potential of Italian industry in export flows in a globalised era, and macro approach, followed by global Institutions for better understanding and reckoning national GDPs, are intended to a more concrete representation of real economy; with reference to the difficult conditions of South Italy's economy, such representation cannot be disregarded in those intervention policies for economic recovery that will take place only when southern Italy's economy will have fully recovered its potentials.