Explaining the Efficiency of Italian Car Suppliers During the Crisis

This empirical study, focused on the Italian automotive sector during the recent international crisis, detects technical performance of firms using Data Envelopment Analysis. We pay specific attention to the role along the supply chain, to size and to vertical structure of firms. In particular, this study highlights how the recent crisis stimulates a deep process of re-organization, relocation and re-thinking of firms' position along the value chain but, in particular, the crisis stresses the pre-existing heterogeneity among firms. The technical frontier is driven by firms able to contribute to the technology, which represents essential link of the automotive value chain. Those firms are large, vertically disintegrated and operate in metals, plastic or machinery.