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This paper examines the evolution of consumption practices in Venice in the long eighteenth century through the combined use of post‐mortem inventories and household budgets. Although Italy experienced a period of relative decline between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our findings suggest that Venetian households enjoyed a rich and vibrant material culture that was fully comparable with those of the most advanced European urban economies. However, although new products, practices, and fashions were adopted by Venetian society, the architecture of consumption did not undergo sudden and extreme changes; rather, consumption was gradually refined, following the path that it had begun during the Renaissance. We therefore argue that the Venetian economy did not experience a consumer revolution but, instead, consumer evolution. Moreover, this study shows that sophisticated consumption practices were not exclusive to the more dynamic economies of the continent but were widespread even in those regions that were victims of the Little Divergence. We thus suggest that the relationship between consumption development and economic development was not necessarily causal and that the diffusion of new consumption practices throughout society was a necessary, but insufficient, prerequisite for economic take‐off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By relying on the number of (surviving) boys per hundred girls observed in the population censuses as a cumulative measure of differential mortality during birth, infancy, and childhood, this paper shows that average Italian child sex ratios (aged 0–4) were abnormally high between 1861 and 1921. Our estimations indicate that unexplained excess female mortality resulted in around 2–3 per cent of 'missing girls' during this period. Likewise, by constructing a new dataset on child sex ratios at the provincial level during the same period, this article shows that child sex ratios tended to be higher in Southern Italy, a geographical cleavage that became stronger as time went by. Crucially, the results reported here cannot be explained by registration issues because (1) the analysis holds if we focus on the sex ratios of older children (aged 5–9) and (2) these patterns are also clearly visible using death registers. Unexplained excess female mortality early in life disappeared from the 1920s onwards, thus suggesting that either discriminatory practices gradually vanished and/or that they no longer translated into higher mortality rates due to enhanced living standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, we demonstrate that Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, in their 2015 Economic History Review note 'Duplication without constraints: Álvarez-Nogal and Chamley's analysis of debt policy under Philip II', provide a misconceived and inaccurate account of our argument about the finances of Philip II in 'Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers' ( Economic History Review, 2014). Here, we summarize our position in the context of the current literature and provide a few comments on data gathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic significance of variation in the number and size of towns across Europe during the early 14th century by comparing the towns of England and of northern Italy. The paper starts by examining the towns of the two countries more closely, distinguishing between those that were very large, large, middle-sized and small. In comparison with rural communities, all towns had more people employed outside agriculture, but this was proportionally more marked in a metropolis like London or Florence than in a small town. The larger the town, the higher the proportion of non-agricultural occupations, the stronger the commitment to producing goods in restricted demand, and the greater the weight of commercial and professional activities. The fact that the contrast between northern Italy and England is so sharp at the top end of the urban scale implies that there was more employment in manufacturing and services in Italy. It also suggests that northern Italy had a wider range of specialized occupations. Studies of urbanization and urban hierarchy characteristically go beyond the statistical classification of towns to establish and explain rank-size relationships between them in different economic regions.

A'Hearn, Delfino, and Nuvolari recently argued in this journal that the indicator function of age heaping for education, and numeracy in particular, is quite limited. In contrast, we show empirically that by applying the methodological elements that were developed over the past decade, age‐heaping‐based numeracy research can be an important tool for economic history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age heaping is widely employed as an indicator of human capital, more specifically of numeracy. We re‐examine the age heaping–numeracy link in the light of evidence from nineteenth‐century Italian censuses, in which education explains little of the variation in age heaping. We argue that in general age heaping is most plausibly interpreted as an indicator of cultural, economic, and institutional modernization rather than a straightforward measure of individual cognitive skills. We do not rule out the use of age heaping as a numeracy indicator, but this needs to be done with research designs that are alert to historical specificities of the context under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the impact of sharecropping on agricultural practices and productivity in central and northern Italy before 1914. There exists a wide consensus among Italian scholars that the prevalence of share tenancy contracts in central Italy in the period before 1914 contributed to the backwardness of farming practices in that area compared with those in the northern regions of the Po valley. One way to interpret this observation is that the differences in agricultural techniques and productivity that existed between the advanced regions of the north and the less advanced regions of the centre in 1911 were due to different tenurial arrangements in the two areas. Sharecropping is viewed as an exploitative system which, in spite of efficiency losses, appealed to the landowning class because it obtained a relatively large share of a small pie. Although the pie would have been larger under a less exploitative system of tenure, the slice going to landowners might have ended up substantially smaller, thus making them worse, not better, off.

This article shows that a shift towards a more centralized school system can benefit countries that are characterized by poor levels of human capital and large regional disparities in education. In 1911, Italy moved from a fully decentralized primary school system towards centralization through the Daneo‐Credaro Reform. The design of the Reform allows us to compare treated municipalities with those that retained school autonomy. Our quasi‐experiment, based on propensity score matching (PSM), shows that centralization substantially increased the pace of human capital accumulation. Treated municipalities were characterized by a 0.43 percentage‐point premium on the average annual growth of literacy between 1911 and 1921. We discuss some of the channels through which the new legislation affected primary schooling and literacy, with important implications for long‐term economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse the effects of plague on the long‐term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629–30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 56 cities covering the period c. 1575–1700, an economic geography model verifying the existence of multiple equilibria is estimated. It is found that cities severely affected by the 1629–30 plague were displaced to a lower growth path. It is also found that plague caused long‐lasting damage to the size of Italian urban populations and to urbanization rates. These findings support the hypothesis that seventeenth‐century plagues played a fundamental role in triggering the process of relative decline of the Italian economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A well‐known debate on the Renaissance economy was held in this journal in 1962–4 between Roberto S. Lopez and Harry Miskimin on one hand and Carlo M. Cipolla on the other. More than half a century later, this topic can be reconsidered in the light of much wider information on the late medieval/early modern Italian economy. Using data on population, urbanization, prices, wages, and GDP, this article outlines the macroeconomic trends in central and northern Italy in the age of the Renaissance (1350–1550). The frequent plagues during the early Renaissance—that is, between 1348 and 1450—decimated the population, probably causing more deaths than in other European countries. Hence resources per worker increased and labour productivity, incomes, and standards of living improved remarkably. A favourable economic environment thus seems to have been a pre‐condition for the Renaissance in culture, art, and politics and the spread of new kinds of consumer demand. From the middle of the fifteenth century, living standards gradually worsened and eventually reached the low levels that had prevailed prior to the Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article addresses the question of how exogenous shocks led to economic redistribution at a local rural community level in the pre‐industrial period, and how inequality can be limited (or not) by institutions and endogenous social structures within the community itself. This article presents a micro‐analytical study conducted mainly on unpublished sources, focusing on a boundary area (the Geradadda) disputed by Milan and Venice during the long period of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) in a broad European perspective. To understand the impact of wars, the management of local commons and communal assets is analysed in the more general context of the management of local finances. This research shows how local communities organized cooperative behaviours for the defence of local resources, developing innovative credit systems and encouraging a process of redistribution. Before other important factors—such as the distribution of wealth or of local political and social power—cooperation between social groups and the role played by elites were the keystones to limiting the increase in inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between guilds and information asymmetries using a large database of quality disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that a high-quality urban textile industry was able to solve externalities using a range of ex ante and ex post monitoring mechanisms based on private market relationships and fair sanctions which effectively reduced adverse selection and information asymmetries. Instead, when guilds did use their quality regulations, the effect of the guild on information asymmetries and the industry as a whole was generally negative, by providing mechanisms that could be manipulated by entrenched interest groups for rent-seeking purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wine cooperatives were relatively scarce in Europe before the Second World War, but by the 1980s accounted for more than half of all wines made in France, Italy, and Spain, the three major producer countries. Unlike Danish dairy cooperatives, whose success before the First World War was linked to their ability to improve product quality and compete in high-value niche markets, wine cooperatives are often associated with the production of large volumes of low-quality products. This article argues that the initial slow diffusion of wine cooperatives was caused by the difficulties of improving quality due to environmental conditions in European vineyards ('terroir') and measurement problems, rather than institutional shortcomings. Cooperatives only became widespread when the state found them a useful instrument to regulate markets, especially after 1950. The problems associated with poor wine quality were never resolved, and cooperatives have become increasingly uncompetitive in the market place, especially following the major decline in per capita consumption and shift towards premium wines from the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carlos Álvarez- Nogal and Christophe Chamley recently published an article in the Economic History Review on ' Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers'. In this note, we show that several claims in their article are very similar to earlier research results, published or circulated long before Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley's original submission, by ourselves and other scholars (section I). These results are repeated without attribution or even mention of the earlier work. In addition, we show that what Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley present as new quantitative insights are actually replications of earlier results of ours (section II). Finally, Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley misrepresent our contributions, as well as those of several other scholars (section III). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The displacement of the centre of the European economy from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the beginning of north-south divergence in Europe has been discussed on the basis of data on real wages, urbanization rates, and, more recently, estimates of gross domestic product for a number of European countries. The purpose of the present article is to contribute to this line of research with the elaboration of yearly series of total energy consumption in Italy and England for the long period 1560-1913. New data on energy services, energy intensity, and, finally, social savings from the use of energy are also presented and discussed for both Italy and England. These new data allow us to specify that energy played a central role. Yet it was relatively late that its importance as a provider of mechanical work developed fully; that is, from 1830 onwards in England and from the end of the nineteenth century in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the phenomenon of independent invention in Italy during the Liberal Age (1861-1913). It makes use of a new dataset comprising all patents granted in Italy in five benchmark years: 1864-5, 1881, 1891, 1902, and 1911. The following exercises are carried out. First, an examination is undertaken of the shares of independent, corporate, and foreign inventions and their evolution over time and across industries. Second, by exploiting the peculiarities of Italian patent legislation, which was characterized by relatively cheap fees and a flexible renewal scheme, the relative quality of independent and corporate patents is assessed. The results indicate that in Italy independent inventors made an important contribution to technological change in terms of number of patents, but the quality of their patents was significantly lower than that of firms and of foreign patentees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents estimates of industrial production in post-Unification Italy's 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents value added estimates for the Italian regions, in benchmark years 1891–1951, which are linked to those from official figures available from 1971 on, in order to offer a long-term picture of Italy’s regional development. Regional activity rates and productivity are also discussed and compared. Some basic questions about Italy’s economic history are briefly considered, including the origins and extent of the north–south divide, the role of migration and regional policy in shaping the pattern of regional inequality, and the positioning of Italy in the international debate on regional convergence, where it stands out because of the long-run persistence of its disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the functioning of Italian insolvency laws and practices, in particular their role in the selection and relaunch of viable firms. The article investigates the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, and focuses on joint-stock companies. Using comparative data on the number of cases, we show that in Italy firms mainly used the procedure called fallimento (bankruptcy), consisting of the collection and subsequent liquidation of assets. Other procedures, such as deals with creditors or forms of receivership, able to give companies a further chance, were rarely used. On the basis of archival documents we maintain that this result was due to the strictness and complication of Italian procedures, as well as to their inability to select viable companies. The article also investigates the relation between the features of insolvency law and the nature of the Italian industrial system, specifically the peculiar small size and rapid turnover of joint-stock companies. We suggest that the pro-liquidation character of the insolvency law might have been one of the causes of the peculiarity of Italian industrial capitalism, even if the opposite direction of causality cannot be excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In interwar Italy, at least six major episodes of banking crises required the intervention of monetary authorities to bail out, restructure, or liquidate distressed intermediaries. The five large universal banks rescued in the systemic crisis of 1930–1 jointly accounted for one-third of the total assets of the banking system. What made Italian leading banks so prone to crises? This article suggests that their fragility was ultimately caused by governance failures, both public and private, that enhanced excess risk-taking. Empirical evidence is consistent with theoretical insights according to which the potential for moral hazard and conflict of interest, endemic in universal banking, can be magnified when banks enter into long-run relationships with firms and base their growth strategy on the pursuance of monopolistic rents. Interwar Italy emerges as a case in which an insider system devoid of the disciplinary devices provided by sound governance institutions created perverse incentives and weakened the resilience of the banking system to adverse macroeconomic shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on obstacles to the emigration of Spanish labor. Contrary to the consensus in the subject literature, it seems that the wheat tariff exercised a positive impact on labor emigration, rather than a negative one. Within a Heckscher-Ohlin model, tariffs increased impediments to trade and stimulated the international mobility of the relatively abundant factor which in the Spanish economy was labor. Emigration from Spain may have been income constrained, in which case higher real wages would have stimulated emigration. However, currency depreciation during the period under consideration actively discouraged emigration. The calculations presented here show that in the absence of depreciation, emigration from Spain could have been more than 40 per cent higher during the period 1892-1905. The difference is significant because of "chains" that these potential emigrants might have developed, and it may account in great part for the differences in labor emigration between Spain and countries such as Italy.

The article presents information about the Latin Monetary Union, a monetary union formed by France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland in 1865. The third quarter of the nineteenth century was for Europe a period of internationalization and liberalization of exchanges, creating the conditions for monetary integration in a situation parallel to that of the Single European Market and the euro in the late twentieth century. As trade barriers were giving way, so were monetary divisions, through a progressive reduction in the number of currencies in circulation. Old coinages were victims of national unification in Switzerland and Italy, of regional monetary agreements in Germany, and of the increased international influence of the currencies of the major countries, the pound and the franc. While the pound exerted a large influence outside continental Europe because of the existence of the empire and the influence of the London money market, French gold coins constituted the largest part of the gold circulation in continental Europe.

This article discusses the economic success of Italy from 1860 to 1940. In the middle of the nineteenth century, more than half of Italian gross domestic product (GDP) was produced in the agricultural sector. Thus, it is not surprising that scholars blame agriculture for the disappointing aggregate performance. The productivity of labor was low, rents high, and peasant earnings barely exceeded subsistence level, which meant that they could not afford to buy industrial goods, thus hampering the development of manufacturing. The cause of this was the technical backwardness, which marked agriculture all over the country, except in small areas in the Po valley. Until recently, there were no estimates of regional GDP before 1911. In that year, income in the south was roughly 70 per cent of the national average." Unfortunately, this piece of information does not facilitate discrimination between the competing hypotheses seeking to explain backwardness, which imply different trends in the nineteenth century.

Presents the author's opinions on fascism in Italy. Views on the economic policies in Italy; Discussion on the economic conditions in Italy; Information on exports of Germany and Italy; Views on the political conditions in Italy; Information on the annual growth rates of industrial production in Europe.

The article explores some reasons as to why Florence, Italy was ever able to establish a position of clear primacy in the trade of southern Italy. This exploration has been conducted not by the direct comparison between Florentines and their rivals, but by looking at internal strengths and weaknesses in the link between Florence and Naples, Italy--strengths which reduced southern reliance on Florence's real and potential rivals, weaknesses which created especially close bonds of economic interdependence. Scholars have long been aware that the scale of the relationship between Florence and Naples was unusually great. Some areas of Florentine success have been indicated in banking, in commerce, in office-holding, in land-getting, in culture too. But it is also necessary to present the Florentine balance-sheet keeping alive the question what specific advantage Florence derived from the south. The first point that must be made is that Florence was well suited to pay for the grain, oil, and livestock it bought in the south. It is abundantly clear that the Florentines paid for these goods by exporting finished cloth to southern Italy. A second consideration was the dependence of Florence on outside food supplies.

This article examines fascist agricultural policies in Italy. In this article, an attempt is made to analyze the impact of fascist agricultural policies on investment, consumption, and the distribution of landholdings. It is argued that had the fascist regime pursued alternative policies, investment in agriculture would have been greater, agricultural output would have grown more rapidly, and Italian workers would have suffered fewer hardships. As it was, fascist policies led to a concentration of landholdings, to a slowing down rather than a speeding up of capital accumulation in the agrarian sector, and to a decline in agricultural production below the sector's productive potential. For the working class, fascism meant impoverishment. It is difficult to evaluate the impact of fascist policies because there is no way of knowing what would have happened in Italy had the fascists not come to power. Rates of employment were lower and improvements in real wages were less in Italy under the fascists than in other industrialized countries during the inter-war period. In Italy government policies, through their impact on demand and costs of production, promoted an inefficient use of resources, slowed the rate of capital accumulation.

The article presents information on articles from periodicals on economic history of Italy. G. Pinto's article, "Firenze e la carestia del" is concerned with the great crises of the fourteenth century. Based on public documents, it examines the provisions undertaken by the Signoria to deal with an emergency and the reactions and consequences which these measures provoked. Purchase of grain from elsewhere, and the financial problems which this brought were not easily soluble, the rationing, struggles among forestallers, and the distribution of bread in local bakeries at fixed prices were nothing other than the "application of an approved defence system". An article by P. Villani provides economic and social history of the kingdom of Naples. The study of the formation and consolidation of a new block of dominant social groups after the crisis of the 1760's, of whom the "rural bourgeoisie" were the most dynamic and aggressive, is considered to be particularly "relevant", along with the effects of the crisis of the ancient regime on the lower classes.