Who were the regional winners and losers of Italy's unification? The question is widely debated, both among scholars and in the broader public, but often on the basis of poorly-documented narratives. Regional development indicators after Italy's unification are readily available. But the lack of systematic indicators before the unification are entirely missing. This project builds a first-ever database that tracks regional economic performances, measured by real wages, on the Italian peninsula all the way back to the 1500. To help explain the observed trends, the project also considers the fundamentals of economic growth - geography, institutions, and culture - recording how these factors evolved over time. The resulting database is able to answer essential questions about Italy's long-run economic performance and regional gaps. In particular, how far back in time does the north-south divide extend? What regions benefitted from the unification and what regions lost out? Did the unification strengthen or weaken Italy's position on the international arena? What can be learned from Italy's regional past to help understand and reduce today's regional gaps and improve the country's overall international position? The project's database will serve as a key reference point in future debates about the origins and long-term evolution of Italy's regional gaps alongside the country's overall economic prospects.
Pushing the research frontier: contributions to ongoing debates and the scientific community
The project's first-ever regional indicators and revised national index of real wages represent a considerable step forward compared to earlier attempts to quantify Italy's historical performances, pioneered by Allen (2001)'s ground-breaking but crude estimates of the country's living standards in the past. Earlier national estimates of real wages for historical Italy have relied on economic data primarily from Tuscany and Lombardy (e.g. Malanima 2013; Rota and Weisdorf 2021) and more recently from the Papal state (Rota and Weisdorf 2020). The current project provides a long-run account of Italy's performance on the basis of all of Italy's regions all the way back to 1500.
Moreover, the project's new indicators will help push the research frontier forward along several dimensions on the basis of the following deliveries:
(1) Tracing Italy's regional economic developments over the very long run:
The project's first-ever systematic regional economic trends will improve our understanding of the origins and long-term developments of regional inequalities in Italy. This enables a re-examination of Italy's position on the international scene over the very long run versus England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, countries for which national real-wage estimates already exist.
(2) The forces of long-run economic growth: forging ahead or falling behind?
The project's new and improved account of Italy's long-run economic development enables us to revisit the much-debated questions concerning the deep-rooted reasons, such as the role played by institutions, for Italy's falling-behind relative to the north-west of Europe since the early-modern period. Italy's long course of development and transition from a European leader to a second-tier industrial country offers an important counterfactual to the standard case-study examined by growth economists and economic historians, that is, England's road to the Industrial Revolution (e.g. Broadberry et al 2015; Humphries and Weisdorf 2019).
(3) The effects of Italy's unification in a national and international perspective:
The project's database permits a series of questions to be answered concerning Italy's relatively late unification compared to those in other European nations. Was the late unification detrimental or beneficial to the country¿s international position on the whole? Did Italy¿s unification help the least advanced pre-unification states to improve their rank in the regional hierarchy, while harming the most advanced ones or vice versa? To what degree did differences in pre-unification state characteristics and performances carry over to the post-unification period? Did the unification serve to diminish or enhance regional gaps? Did it cause a regional reversal of fortune?
(4) Theory development, policy implications, and a scientific platform for future research:
Finally, once the database is built and regional economic trends have been identified, improved theories about comparative regional developments in Italy can be advanced alongside policy-initiatives aimed to close contemporary gaps. Furthermore, by making the database publicly available, future debates, discussions, and research projects will benefit from access to first-ever accurate long-run regional development indicators. Equally, the database devices a platform onto which prospective data can be added as these become available in future scholarship for a still deeper understanding of inter-regional developments in Italy.
Outreach:
The project will result in a number of academic articles. These will be published in leading high-profile economic history or development journals. Also, the database will be made available, both to the public and to the scientific community, on a dedicated website.
Other channels of diffusion of the project¿s results include conference participation, invited research-seminar presentations, and other public speeches, as well as collaborations with newspaper journalists and well-known online scientific columns such as Vox.eu and LaVoce.info.
The project will also organise a summer school for junior scholars in Italy, providing them with the opportunity to get updated with the project¿s findings.
Last but not least, the project will provide state-of-the-art hands-on teaching materials on the economic history of Italy for teachers and students across the country, this way increasing awareness of the country¿s long economic history.