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Comment by crate_barre | Hacker News Reader

So what is Italy’s main economy at this point, just tourism? I was also under the impression the a large number of immigrants are moving there to do all the odd jobs.

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A lot of people get the idea that Italy is poor and only running on tourism and olive oil from popular media, but it's actually a complex economy with lots of high tech exports. The biggest exports are medical and engineering products[0]. There's a lot of problems to be sure, but it's still a competitive, high tech economy, especially in the north.

[0]https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ita/

One day I noticed nearly all of my food comes from Italy. They are also famous for clothes, and that seems to hold true as well - my best jacket is italian.

Here's a visualization of Italy's exports:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/It...

Ice hockey fans take note: this includes Zamboni! Or, used to — not up on the modern lore.

Italy is a big exporter of mechatronic products. It is the second ( or third depending on sources) manufacturing economy in Europe just after Germany. Its engineering culture has always been very strong and will stay strong for a long time to come.

I suggest you take a look at the "black marble" (Earth at night from space), in the European area. You will see that together with the extended megalopolis Lille-Antwerpen-Liège up to the Bonn-Duisburg-Dortmund aggregations, the most noticeable extended megalopolis is the Padanian valley. It is not tourism to drive that.

I believe Northern Italy has a good economy, the South Seems to be where the issues are.

The GDP per capita in Northern Italy is in general over or around 30k€; in Southern Italy below or around 20k€.

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