Transit constraints in the Suez Canal make Italian export prospects in 2024 "uncertain". The largest concern today is the Suez blockade: "The longer it is, the greater the negative effects on Italian and global foreign trade," warns the Confindustria research office in its quarterly economic report. By the beginning of the year, "ship traffic in the Red Sea has more than halved and the cost of transporting containers from Asia to Europe has increased by 92%." And this weighs severely on a country like Italy, because maritime routes are "crucial": Ships account for 54% of all trade, with 40% passing through Suez. And that is not all. More than 90% of Italian trade with the major countries east of the Red Sea (in Asia and the Middle East) occurs by water. The sectors that could be affected "are: oil and gas exchanges (from Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Iraq; part of Saudi Arabia's oil is instead shipped to the north of Yemen), those of electronic goods and electrical appliances (more than half of non-EU imports come from China), those of leather products (almost a third comes from China), those of machinery (especially outgoing to the main Asian countries)" . The CSC's first report of the year provides a more broad sense of the context of "new tensions" and "new risks" that break into the scenario for the Italian economy beyond 2023, in which "Italian GDP may have performed better than expected".
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