Carlo Ciccarelli

Through the Magnifying Glass: Provincial Aspects of Industrial Growth in Post‐Unification Italy

This article presents estimates of industrial production in post�?Unification Italys 69 provinces in the census years 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911. Initially industry was largely artisanal, and located in the former political capitals; but even then the waterfalls of the subalpine north�?west attracted what factory industry there was. Contrary to widespread opinion, in the aftermath of Unification the industrial and overall growth leaders were actually in the south, where selected provinces reaped the gains from the freer foreign trade, and infrastructure investment, that accompanied the loss of independence. Over the later nineteenth century industry concentrated into the ‘industrial triangle’; but even there industrialization remained sharply local, and excluded the right bank of the upper Po. The early twentieth century, in turn, brought a measure of industrial diffusion - to the centre/north�?east, where it was tied to the production of perishables on recently improved land - and concentration within the north�?western triangle itself, into its major cities, as progress in energy transmission effectively moved the waterfalls into the plains.

METALMAKING IN ITALY, 1861-1913: NATIONAL AND REGIONAL TIME SERIES

This paper presents national and regional time-series estimates of metalmaking production in post-Unification Italy. The former broadly confirm their immediate predecessors; the latter are altogether new. The regional series evidence the industrys geographic concentration: the significant producers were Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Tuscany, Umbria, and Campania, but production per capita significantly exceeded the national average only in Liguria and, in the later years, in Umbria and Tuscany.

Shipbuilding in Italy, 1861-1913: the burden of the evidence

Ship-building in post-Unification Italy is here documented by new national and re-gional time series. Where the extant national series point to secular decline, the new estimates reveal a major increase in output tied primarily to the growth of repair work on the one hand and of naval construction on the other. The re-gional estimates, which have no precedent in the literature, point to consider-able concentration: Liguria accounted for more than half the product, and Campania for almost another quarter. Again, while in most regions shipbuild-ing was barely significant, in Liguria it represented up to a quarter of total in-dustrial production. The further disaggregation of naval construction points to significant exports, from the 1890s, by the private yards in Tuscany and Lig-uria; the consensus view that Italy’s engineering industry was then too back-ward to export at all is clearly unfounded.

Patterns of industrial specialisation in post-Unification Italy

This paper investigates the main patterns of industrial specialisation in Italian provinces over half a century following the Unification of the country. To this end, we propose a multivariate graphical technique named dynamic specialisation biplot. In 1871, specialisation vocations towards the different manufacturing sectors were limited in size and no clear geographical clustering emerged. A regional specialisation divide resulted instead clearly in 1911. In 1871 as in 1911, the foodstuffs, textile and engineering sectors represented the three pillars delimiting the arena of the specialisation race. Within that arena, the effect of public policies on the temporal evolution of provincial specialisation is considered. The adoption of free trade in the early 1860s affected noticeably the industrial specialisation of a few Neapolitan provinces. The subsequent protectionist measures altered the specialisation trajectories of selected northern provinces, largely attracted by the textile sector during the 1880s, and by the rapidly growing engineering sector in the pre-First World War decade. Within and between regional homogeneity and smooth specialisation, trajectories are instead representative of most of the remaining provinces. Among them, southern provinces exhibit specialisation paths revealing that little more than a composition effect occurred among manufacturing sectors.

Construction in Italy's Regions, 1861-1913

This paper presents time-series estimates of construction activity in the regions of post-Unification Italy. Total construction followed very different time paths, reflecting the sharply local cycles in railway construction. Other public works were less idiosyncratic; the boom of the Giolitti years was widely diffused, but that of the 1880s was much more concentrated in Latium and Liguria. In the construction of buildings, the Giolittian boom was marked in the North and Center, but spotty in the South and major islands; earlier swings were comparatively minor, save of course for the 1880s bubble in Latium. Over the long term, railway construction was, per-capita, relatively evenly spread. Other social-overhead construction displays a similar pattern, but with exceptionally high levels in Latium and Liguria. Building construction seems instead to have declined somewhat from North to South; Liguria was again the overall leader, with Latium second.

The Industrial Labor Force of Italy's Provinces: Estimates from the Population Censuses, 1871-1911

This paper presents statistical reconstructions of the industrial laborforce in post-Unification Italy. The estimates are based on the populationcensuses taken in 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911. The figures are presentedfor each of Italys 69 provinces, separately by gender. Industry, as is customaryin the literature, is defined so to include four major components:mining, manufacturing, construction, and utilities. Manufacturing is inturn broken down into 12 sectors. Some of the limits of population censuses,including their questionable representation of the labor force in thetextile sector, are briefly summarized. The paper focuses then on possibleuses of the proposed labor force estimates. It is in particular shown that,despite their known limits, population censuses represent a useful historicalsource to obtain legitimate estimates of provincial value added for Italysindustry. The present contribution, that aims at stimulating the quantitativedebate on Italian industry and industrialization at the local level,ends by presenting tentative directions for future research.

The Rail-Guided Vehicles Industry in Italy, 1861–1913: The Burden of the Evidence

This paper presents the first annual estimates for the rail-guided vehicles industry in post-Unification Italy. Nationally, maintenance was naturally trend-dominated, while new construction followed a Kuznets cycle; overall, maintenance exceeded new construction, while freight cars represented the largest component of the latter. The limited production of locomotives over the initial decades seems tied to high raw material costs rather than to technical inadequacy. Regionally, new construction was concentrated in the industrial triangle, and in Campania; maintenance was more widely diffused, as repair work tended to follow local traffic, but it too was largely absent from the swath of mostly Southern regions without major urban centers.

Social-overhead construction in Italy’s Regions, 1861-1913

This article presents estimates of social-overhead construction in Italys regions. The new-construction series point to a largely common cycle in non-railway work, and largely idiosyncratic bursts of railway building. Maintenance doubles as an index of the underlying stock, which cannot be calculated from the flows alone; one finds limited convergence, and only in railway infrastructure. Industrial and overall growth are increasingly correlated both with the initial stock, and with its increment. Direct measures of welfare improvements are uncertain, but the relative increases in draftees’ mean heights correlate in particular with social-overhead investment.

The location of the Italian manufacturing industry, 1871–1911: a sectoral analysis

This study focuses on industrial location in Italy during the period 1871–1911, when manufacturing moved from artisanal to factory-based production processes. There is general agreement in the historical and economic literature that factor endowment and domestic market potential represented the main drivers of industrial location. We test the relative importance of the above drivers of location for the various manufacturing sectors using data at the provincial level. Estimation results reveal that the location of capital intensive sectors (such as chemicals, cotton, metalmaking and paper) was driven by domestic market potential and literacy. Once market potential and literacy are accounted for, the evidence on the effect of water endowment on industrial location is mixed, depending on the manufacturing sector considered.

Business Fluctuations in Imperial Austria's Regions, 1867-1913: New Evidence

This paper presents annual estimates of total and per-capita GDP at 1910 prices for the regions of Imperial Austria from the origin of the Dual Monarchy (1867) to the eve of WWI (1913). The time paths of regional GDP are estimated from the yield of the tax on the transfer of real and financial property which is itself very highly correlated with the Schulze (2007) estimates of regional GDP for census years (1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910). The relative continuity or discontinuity of per-capita GDP growth partitions Austrias regions into two groups. Clear evidence of discontinuity (a “take-off”) is present in Carniola, Carinthia, Salzburg, Styria, Littoral, Tyrol, and to some extent Moravia. In Lower and Upper Austria, Bohemia, Silesia, Galicia, Bukovina, and Dalmatia there is instead no evidence of structural break in their growth rates. Significant drops in the level of pc GDP do occur (as in Lower Austria and Bohemia after the 1873 financial crash) but have moderate effects on the growth of subsequent years. Regional (per-capita) inequality is also evaluated using standard measures. The coefficient of variation and Theil index follow a U-shape curve: after a decline lasted about 15 years they both rise and point to, from ca. 1885, growing divergence.