Il prodotto delle regioni e il divario Nord-Sud in Italia (1861-2004)

The article presents the yearly series of Italian regional per capita product in the period 1891-2004. An estimate is also provided of the product in the North and South from 1861 until today. The following periods are singled out in the series of product: 1861-1913: formation of regional disparities with the start of modern growth; 1920-39: deepening of disparities among regions and especially between North and South; 1951-73: decline in disparities; 1974-2004: new deepening of North-South disparities, with some decline in the last years. The role of labour productivity and employment in the unequal growth of North and South is discussed in the end.

A Puzzling Relationship

In this article, consumption in early modern Europe is analysed in terms of prices, incomes and per capita GDP. We focus in particular on England and Italy, and stress both the similarities and differences. We show how the increase in consumption of some items is not at odds with decline or stability in labour incomes and, probably, per capita output. The “social” perspective of improved living conditions can in fact be reconciled with the “economic” perspective of a fall in wages.L’article étudie la consommation dans l’Europe Moderne sous l’angle de l’analyse des prix, des revenus et du PIB par habitant. Il s’intéresse plus spécifiquement à l’Angleterre et à l’Italie qui sont envisagées d’un point de vue comparatiste. Il souligne que la croissance de la consommation n’est pas incompatible avec le déclin ou la stabilité des salaires ni, probablement, du revenu par habitant. La perspective « sociale » faisant état d’une amélioration des conditions de vie peut ainsi être réconciliée avec la  perspective « économique »  mettant en lumière la baisse des salaires réels

Chapter Ineguaglianze economiche. Le certezze e le incertezze

The aim of the opening speech is to present the most discussed issues in relation to inequality in personal distribution of income and wealth. In particular, it first examines the current trends in economic inequality (§ 1-4). Overall, some certainty has been achieved on these trends over the last century. In a second part of this opening speech (§ 5-7), some knowledge we have about pre-modern inequalities is summarized. In this regard, uncertainties are much more numerous than certainties

North versus South: Energy transition and energy intensity in Europe over 200 years

The paper examines energy consumption in Sweden, Holland, Italy and Spain over 200 years, including both traditional and modern energy car-riers. The article is based on totally new series of energy consumption in-cluding traditional carriers along with modern sources. Our main purposes are a closer examination of the process of the energy transition in Europe and a revision of the prevailing idea of there being, over the long run, an inverted U-curve in energy intensity. Changes in energy consumption are decomposed into effects from population growth, economic growth and energy intensity. The results on energy intensity challenge previous suggestions of most scholars. An inverted U curve does not exist whenever we include traditional sources of energy in our analysis

Trends in Mediterranean Inequalities 1950-2015

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the trends of economic, social and political inequality among the Mediterranean countries in the period 1950-2015. After the examination of the inequalities in GDP per capita among and within nations, we present a human development index (HDI) that includes a measure of democratic achievements. The main result is that inequalities in income, after the rise from the 1950s onwards, declined from the start of the twenty-first century. Inequa¬lities in HDI, instead, constantly diminished in the period under examination, while a process of democratization occurred. On the whole, despite the conver-gence among Mediter¬ranean countries, economic inequalities are much deeper than those in social and political indicators

Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro? Il Mezzogiorno fra storia e pubblicistica

The recent work by E. Felice, Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro, il Mulino, Bologna, 2013, is rather a pamphlet than a book of economic history. In the present article, we discuss both the statistical series of regional GDP from 1871 until 2001 worked out by Felice (section 1), and the in-terpretation of the North-South disparity in the long term (section 2). In section 3 we contrast our approach to the Italian regional disparities with that by Felice. While, according to Felice, the Italian North-South divide depends on social and institutional factors, and, in particular, on the mistakes of the Southern ruling class in the past, in our view it is the consequence of the interplay of economic factors during the Italian industrialisation starting at the end of the Nineteenth cen-tur

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie