A comprehensive ex-post assessment of RES deployment in Italy: Jobs, value added and import leakages

Although during the period under consideration Italy experienced an expansion in RES capacity that went beyond the rosiest expectations, it appears that the resulting demand for plant components was met to a very significant extent by imports. We find that the contribution to sectoral value added and employment was not as large as envisioned by ex-ante analyses. In net terms, the resources absorbed by RES plants in the construction, installation and manufacturing phase seem to have made a smaller contribution to the domestic economy than they would have in several counterfactual scenarios. The opposite is true for the resources used in the subsequent operation and management phase. Finally, our results suggest that variation in domestic content of manufactured products may limit the portability of RES employment and value added factor estimates across countries.