Trade in fake Italian goods costs economy billions of euros

Giuseppe Conte, Italian Prime Minister. (Presidenza della Repubblica, 2018)

This article is brought to you in association with OECD.

Global trade in fake Italian goods such as luxury handbags, watches, foodstuffs and car parts is taking a bite out of Italy’s economy equivalent to around 1-2% of GDP in terms of lost sales, according to a new OECD report.

Trade in counterfeit goods and the Italian economy estimates the total value of counterfeit and pirated Italian goods sold worldwide at over 35 billion euros for 2013, equivalent to 4.9% of global Italian manufacturing sales. This resulted in over 25 billion euros in lost sales by Italian companies in a year when Italy’s GDP was 1.6 trillion euros.

Past OECD analysis of data from nearly half a million customs seizures around the world over 2011-13 has shown that trade in counterfeit goods is worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year, or 2.5% of global imports. US, Italian and French brands are among the hardest hit, and with an economy that thrives on producing high-value products, protected by intellectual property rights and trademarks, Italy is especially vulnerable.

As well as examining the impact of trade in fake Italian products, the report also looks at the impact on Italy of imports of counterfeit goods. It finds that fake imports were worth over 10 billion euros, or 3% of imports, in 2013 and resulted in foregone domestic sales by Italian wholesalers and shops of around 7 billion euros. The fake items were imported mainly from China (50%) and Hong Kong (29%), followed by Greece (6%), Singapore (4%) and Turkey (2%).

The combination of trade in fake Italian products and imports of counterfeit goods resulted in a loss of public revenues in Italy equal to 10 billion euros, or 0.6% of Italian GDP. Counterfeiting and piracy also led to the loss of at least 87,000 jobs in Italy in 2013, equivalent to 2% of the country’s full-time equivalent employees.

The highest losses in sales, in euro terms, in the Italian wholesale and retail sectors due to counterfeit and pirated imports in 2013 were for high-tech electronic, electrical and optical products, followed by clothing, footwear, leather and related products. In terms of market share, the biggest losses were in the watch and jewellery sector, where the counterfeit market caused a 7.5% loss in sales.

The report shows that around half of the fake goods smuggled into Italy in 2013 were sold to consumers who were aware they were buying fake products, with the remaining share purchased unknowingly. The share of fakes bought knowingly in Italy ranges from 15% from food items to 60% for watches and IT and communications devices.

The OECD is working with governments to address gaps in regulation and poor law enforcement that enable counterfeit trade, largely run by organised crime gangs, to flourish.