Italian Business-to-Business Invoicing Data: A Network Analysis

We present a comprehensive description of the network of Italian Business-to-Business commercial relationships, based on the universe of electronic invoices collected by the Italian Tax Office. The firm-to-firm detail of the data is exploited to describe the distribution of the numbers of buyers (customers) and sellers (suppliers) per firm, the centrality of each firm in the production network, and the average distance between firms. We characterize for the first time the firm-to-firm network describing the Italian production system, and present its geographic and sectoral breakdown. The analysis reveals heavy tailed distributions for the numbers of buyers and sellers per firm, implying a scale-free structure of the network. The distributions of centrality values display heavy tails as well, indicating a strong concentration of importance in a relatively small number of firms. We estimate the tail exponents for all these distributions, finding in all cases lower exponents for downstream (buyer-side) distributions than for the upstream (seller-side) ones.