PRIN 2022 – Industrialization in France and Britain: a new comparative economic history (1700-1913) [CHART]
The aim of this project is to offer a new interpretation of the Industrial Revolution adopting a comparative quantitative approach featuring simultaneously Britain (the first industrial nation) and France (the leading continental power of the 18th century). This comparative perspective will permit an innovative characterization of the factors accounting for the precocious origins of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and for its delayed development in the rest of the continent. To this aim, we will construct several original datasets covering both countries, and mapping the three main drivers of industrialization (innovation, real wages and human capital) emerging from the recent Allen-Mokyr (2009) debate on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. From a spatial point of view, our unit of analysis will be the provincial level (departments in France and counties in England). This disaggregation corresponds roughly to the modern NUTS-3 level, offering a much more fine-grained perspective compared to the existing accounts of industrialization that tend to adopt a national or a very coarse regional perspective. The dataset will comprise 85 British (England, Scotland and Wales) counties and 89 departments at early 19th century historical borders, enabling a panel structure with 174 provinces. This richness of data has the potential to provide a more articulated testing of the major interpretative conjectures concerning the drivers of different patterns of industrialization charting both the emergence (18th century) and the consolidation (19th-early 20th centuries) of the Industrial Revolution. The project brings together a team of researchers with a sound expertise in the quantitative economic history of industrialization and also on British and French historical sources.
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PRIN 2020 – Economic development in Italy from the Middle Ages to today: a regional perspective (EDIT)
The deep history of Italy’s regional development gaps, and each region’s contribution to the country’s overall economic performance, are widely debated but often on the basis of poorly-documented narratives. This project builds a database of long-run development indicators that track regional economic performances on the Italian peninsula all the way back to the middle ages. To help explain the observed trends, the project also quantifies the fundamentals of economic growth – geography, institutions, culture, and demography – recording how these factors evolved over time. On the basis of the resulting database, the project then deploys state-of-the-art analytical tools to answer essential questions about Italy’s long-run economic performance and regional gaps. Key questions include: what regions and growth fundamentals were responsible for Italy’s late-medieval European leadership? Was the country’s subsequent economic decline an all-encompassing one, or did it only concern certain regions or sectors of the economy? Who were the regional winners and losers of Italy’s unification and why? 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 to improve the country’s overall international position? The project offers the first-ever systematic attempt worldwide to trace a country’s regional economic developments back into the pre-modern era. The database and analytical discoveries will serve as key reference points in future debates about the origins and long-term evolution of Italy’s regional gaps alongside the country’s overall economic prospects.
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PRIN 2017 – Lost highway: skills, technology and trade in Italian economic growth, 1815-2018 (LOST HIGHWAY)
This project examines the long term historical roots of the recent Italian “falling behind”. Our guiding hypothesis is that factor endowments, by encumbering investments in innovation and human capital formation, represented a major burden for the long term development of the Italian economy. The project is structured around six main hypotheses on the relationships between factor endowment, real wages, skill premium, productivity growth, innovative activity, technological content of trade and economic performance. The project is fundamentally data-driven and it involves a major systematization of Italian economic series for the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the present day. We will interpret the data using the standard analytical tools of new economic history and we will also explore some counterfactual scenarios using agent-based models, focusing on major historical junctures and key policy decisions.
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