The Atlantic divide: methodological and epistemological differences in economic history

In the paper the development of economic history will be placed within the evolution of Western thought and culture. Therefore an analysis of the connections between economic history and contemporary epistemology will be carried out. In this perspective an analogy with the traditional division between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy would appear to be useful for economic history too: the first had long prevailed in Anglo-Saxon, the second in continental, culture. This partition evokes and embraces the antithesis between scientific and humanist culture, between logic and rhetoric, analysis and interpretation, conceptual clarification and visions of the world. The paper suggest that the opposition that loomed large over the post W.W.II decades between Anglo-American and European economic histories can also be conceived as a specific form of the wider opposition between ‘analytic style’ and ‘continental style’.economic history, methodology, epistemology, cliometrics, business history, economic thought

Energy Supply And Economic Development In Italy: The Role Of The State-Owned Companies

The paper focuses on the role played by state-owned enterprise in the energy history and policy in Italy. A fundamental issue of the economic history of the country is if and how scarcity of raw materials, and particularly of primary energy sources, affected its modern economic growth. As different as they are, answers to such a question cannot but recognize the role played in the long run by direct state intervention: either in order to reduce the energy dependence of the country from abroad, or to guarantee the supply of fuel and oil products to the Italian market, particularly after the 1973 oil crisis.Italy, energy, history, state-intervention

Boundaries and governance of Italian state-owned enterprise: a quantitative approach

For the most part of the last century the role of State owned enterprises was probably more pronounced, continuous and prolonged in Italy than elsewhere in the West. This was the response to the fact that Italian economic growth had long been penalized by structural frailties such as a narrow internal market, a shortage of capital, financial weakness and a decline of entrepreneurial initiative. Yet, the complexity of forms and organizations assumed by the State direct intervention in the economy (just to limit our analysis to the central level) reached heights of imagination and ingenuity in Italy that were probably unknown abroad: State companies, State monopolies, shareholding companies, State concerns and so on co-existed throughout the twentieth century. This helps to explaining why we do not yet have a precise and thorough measure of the weight of public enterprise on the entire economy, not to say of more specific data concerning their sectorial and/or regional distribution. Thus it has not been so far possible to identify precisely - at a micro level - the real dimension of Italian public enterprise, and hence assess a phenomenon whose actual magnitude remains unknown to us. The aim of our paper is to fill this gap by showing the basic features of the dimension, boundaries, structure, governance and location of Italian SOEs.Italy, State owned enterprise, size and structure, governance, economic history

Una nota sulla storia del concetto di imprenditore

Relativamente alla figura dell’imprenditore, appare assumere una certa consistenza l'ipotesi che si sia a lungo mantenuta una sorta di dicotomia fra due tradizioni di ricerca: quella prevalente sul continente europeo, che, prendendo le mosse dall'Italia tardo-medievale, giunge fino a Schumpeter e ai suoi epigoni; e quella anglosassone, che sviluppatasi nell'Inghilterra della scuola classica avrà poi nell'America del Novecento l'ambiente ideale per la sua affermazione. Nella tradizione continentale, in cui prevale un approccio ermeneutico/interpretativo, la rappresentazione del processo economico lascia spazio per l'agire individuale e per la vitalità e la creatività dei soggetti economici. In quella anglosassone, invece, sempre più caratterizzata da uno "stile" analitico\ la ricerca del funzionamento oggettivo del sistema economico rigetta un'analisi del comportamento individuale distinta, e indipendente, dalle dinamiche delle macrograndezze economiche

Opening the black box of Entrepreneurship: the Italian case in a historical perspective

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the Second industrial revolution and the end of the XX century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an empirical based-taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs not exclusively based on intuitions and qualitative judgments, we provide valuable interpretative elements; second, we put forward some hypothesis about the relationship between entrepreneurship and Italian economic growth. In particular we perform a Cluster Analysis which singles out five different entrepreneurial typologies characterized by a widespread tendency to searching for new markets, yet a scarce attitude towards innovation. Further we suggest that the evolution of the institutional context slowed down the development of the entrepreneurial abilities and virtues necessary to grow.History of Entrepreneurship; Italian capitalism

Italian Entrepreneurship: Conjectures and Evidence from a Historical Perspective

This paper is the first product of an ongoing research on the determinants and the role of entrepreneurship in Italian economic development. Its primary aim is the creation of a data-set of Italian entrepreneurs for the period encompassed between the Unification of the Kingdom (1861) and the end of the XXth century. The main source of the research is a collection of 390 entrepreneurial biographies, prepared for an ongoing Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs. The first part of the paper presents a descriptive analysis of the main peculiarities of the country’s entrepreneurship on the basis of a few standard variables traditionally used in economic analysis. The second one refines the descriptive approach through a methodology – Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis – usual by now in standard statistics, yet not very familiar to scholars in economic and/or business history. This has allowed us to single out a few entrepreneurial typologies of the history of Italian capitalism which partly confirm the “traditional” features already emphasized by historiography; such as the prominence of northern entrepreneurs, the strong relations both with own and partner’s families, the almost total absence of female entrepreneurs and an essentially middle-class rooted entrepreneurship. However a few novel interesting aspects emerge, the most surprising being the good level of formal education of the sample: a neat majority (60%) has a medium/high degree and almost one third an university degree.Business history, Italian entrepreneurship, cluster analysis

What makes a successful (and famous) entrepreneur? Historical evidence from Italy (XIX-XX centuries)

In this article, we employ a “quantitative” prosopographical approach to study the nature and the determinants of entrepreneurial success in Italy during the XIX-XX centuries. Our main source is the Biographical Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs, which contains very detailed biographies of 608 major Italian entrepreneurs. Our findings indicate the multidimensional nature of entrepreneurial success, comprising both a strictly economic and a “celebrity” dimension. Concerning the determinants of success, our findings point to the “political” nature of Italian capitalism

Opening the black box of entrepreneurship: The Italian case in a historical perspective

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the Second industrial revolution and the end of the XX century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an empirical based-taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs not exclusively based on intuitions and qualitative judgments, we provide valuable interpretative elements; second, we put forward some hypothesis about the relationship between entrepreneurship and Italian economic growth. In particular we perform a Cluster Analysis which singles out five different entrepreneurial typologies characterized by a widespread tendency to search for new markets, yet a scarce attitude towards innovation. Further we suggest that the evolution of the institutional context slowed down the development of the entrepreneurial abilities and virtues necessary to grow