The Intra-industry Trade for a Highincome Country: New Empirical Evidence for Italy

This paper examines the determinants of Italian intra-industry trade in horizontally and vertically differentiated products. The dataset used eliminates the effects linked to the hypothesis of homogeneity both between countries − when specific industry characteristics are analysed − and between sectors − within the same country. In this way, within limits, we tried to address an issue raised by Greenaway et al. in 1999 which, on the basis of the current state of the literature on intra-industry trade, have not received specific attention. Our paper highlights how strong the impact of this hypothesis could be in the analyses of the determinants of intra-industry trade in the case of Italy.