New estimates of Italy’s GDP per capita from 1300 to 1861 show that the gap between Centre-North and South shrank after the Black Death and diverged again starting in the 17th century. Compared to the rest of Western Europe, Italy had lost all its GDP capita advantage by 1800. (CEPR, November 2024)
by Astralesean
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> There is a lively debate around the long-run performance of Italy since the Middle Ages. This column introduces new estimates of Italy’s GDP per capita from 1300 to 1861. The estimates are constructed using the demand-side approach and are based on nearly 95,000 price/wage observations from almost 200 locations. The estimates provide new insights on the drivers of the ‘Little Divergence’ between Italy and the countries of the North Sea region (England and the Netherlands) after the Middle Ages. Additionally, it explores the long-term origins of the economic divide between North and Southern Italy.
> The long-run performance of the Italian economy in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period has always been controversial, with a prevailing pessimistic view of an absolute and relative decline since the 17th century and a lively debate about its causes (Cipolla 1952, Rapp 1976, Sella 1979, Alfani 2013). The pioneering estimates of the GDP per capita of the Centre-North by Paolo Malanima (2011) have offered a more optimistic view, with a long-term stagnation until the 18th century, but so far they have not been matched by a comparable series for the South.
> In our paper (Federico et al. 2024), we estimate, for the first time, yearly series of GDP per capita for Italy and its two constituent macro-areas (Centre-North and South) from 1328, the earliest feasible date, to 1861, the year of the unification of the country. The data on production are very scarce and inconsistent and thus, as standard in the literature, we use data on prices and wages, following the so-called demand-side approach. This method yields a series of GDP per capita expressed as a real output index using a two-step procedure: first, we estimate agricultural output per capita using a simple demand function featuring real wages as a proxy for income (adjusting daily wages with a new estimate of change in working days), a price index of agricultural goods and a price index of manufactures. In the second step, we compute the share of non-agricultural production in GDP based on estimates of the share of non-agricultural employment (inferred from urbanisation rates), adjusted by the relative productivity of non-agricultural workers versus agricultural workers. Finally, we compute a purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rate of regional currencies with pound sterling in 1850 and we use it to convert our index series of GDP per capita into 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars, to make it comparable with the long-term data available for other European countries. Our estimates are constructed using a new large-scale dataset comprising nearly 95,000 wage/prices observations from 169 locations for wages and 186 for prices, retrieved from both archival and published sources. This large-scale dataset has an unprecedented coverage and represents a marked improvement with respect to previous studies.
> Figure 1 plots our estimates of GDP per capita in 1990$ for Italy and its constituting macro-areas (smoothing yearly fluctuations with an Epanechnikov kernel). The national series fluctuates widely around an average of $1360. The GDP hit an all-time peak in the early decades of the 15th century, during the early Renaissance, declined until the mid-16th century, recovered in the 17th century, and remained quite high until the 1720s. We find a sharp decline for the rest of the 18th century and trendless fluctuations in the first decades of the 19th century.
> The series for Central-Northern and Southern Italy show a similar pattern, albeit the recovery phase of the 17th century seems weaker in the South. Notably, southern GDP at its 1800 trough was extremely low, being one third lower than the level of the Middle Ages.
> Figure 2 compares Italy, with the two ‘winners’ of the so-called ‘Little Divergence’: the Netherlands and England. Up to 1500, Italian GDP per capita remained substantially higher than that of the other two countries. The Netherlands overtook Italy around the mid-16th century, a little earlier than the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the Dutch economy (de Vries and van der Woude 1997). Our estimates indicate that the decline of Italy relative to England begins in the second half of the 17th century, with England forging ahead after 1680. England further advanced during the 18th century, driven by the Industrial Revolution. By 1861, Italian GDP per capita was only slightly more than one third of the English level.
> Notwithstanding its decline relative to the Netherlands and England, Italy enjoyed a substantially higher level of GDP per capita than France and Germany until the start of its absolute decline in the early 18th century (Figure 3). By 1800, Italy had lost all its advantage, and in the central decades of the century both France and, to a smaller extent, Germany forged ahead.
> Our research sheds new light on the origins and the persistence of the regional divide between Northern and Southern Italy, an issue which has long puzzled economists, historians, and social scientists and has not yet been settled. In particular, the historical origin of the gap remains highly controversial. In a seminal contribution, Putnam (1993) argued that the roots of this enduring economic divide can be traced back to the distinct civic traditions that emerged during the Middle Ages, leading to significantly higher levels of social capital in the Centre-North regions compared to the South. At the other end of the spectrum, authors such as Capecelatro and Carlo (1972) claimed that the regional divergence was largely a consequence of the political unification in 1861, and the misconceived development policies implemented by the newly founded state. Outside of academia, this latter interpretation, championed by a group of popular historians who dub themselves as ‘Neo-Bourbonist’, has recently gained traction with best-selling books and receiving extensive coverage in newspapers and magazines, and sustained visibility on social media.
> Over the last 20 years, our understanding of the regional differences in economic performance from the political unification in 1861 to WWI, the so-called ‘Liberal Age’, has significantly advanced thanks to systematic quantitative reappraisals of GDP per capita (Felice 2019, Chiaiese 2024), industrial production (Ciccarelli and Fenoaltea 2013), inventive activities (Nuvolari and Vasta 2017), real wages (Federico et al. 2019), and living standards (Felice and Vasta 2015, Vecchi 2017). Conversely, the period before the unification remains largely uncharted.
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Grazie infinite, super interessante!! Malgrado la parzialità dei dati (ed il mio scetticismo per la validità di certi strumenti di analisi economica per contesti non/pre-capitalisti) auspico che indagini di questo tipo ci aiutino a comprendere le attuali realtà politico-economiche nei loro contesti di lungo corso.
In particolare credo sarebbe interessante associare queste ricerche alle evoluzioni politico-istituzionali locali. Il Settentrione d’Italia ha ampiamente contribuito alla formazione delle basi del sistema capitalista anche nelle sue realtà statuali e culturali, non solo commerciali e bancarie, mentre il Meridione già dall’Assise di Ariano veniva ad assestarsi su traiettorie molto diverse, che saranno contigue con le politiche spagnole retrograde ed al limite dell’economia di rapina; a ciò va ad aggiungersi la spinta centrifuga del Viceregno aragonese, la cui formazione coincide con il tracollo economico da cui il Sud non si riprese più.
>Our estimates are constructed using a new large-scale dataset comprising nearly 95,000 wage/prices observations from 169 locations for wages and 186 for prices, retrieved from both archival and published sources. This large-scale dataset has an unprecedented coverage and represents a marked improvement with respect to previous studies
>In our paper (Federico et al. 2024), we estimate, for the first time, yearly series of GDP per capita for Italy and its two constituent macro-areas (Centre-North and South) from 1328, the earliest feasible date, to 1861, the year of the unification of the country
L’intervallo sono 533 anni e circa 178 dati per anno in media. Giudicate voi se sono abbastanza o no, io questa roba la evito come la peste e sono particolarmente scettico di analisi che implicano allo stato X origini Y, specialmente se queste distano decenni o secoli addietro.
Però voglio vedere la distribuzione di questi dati nella scala temporale.
Da appassionato di prima rivoluzione industriale, quando gli economisti ci si mettono a cercre di spiegarne le cause si lamentano tutti che non hanno molti dati già dal 1700 in poi. Vorrei proprio vedere la % di questi prima del 1500.
mah… a parte OP che riporta dati sbagliati rispetto a quelli citati dall’ articolo, l’articolo è in se per se la scoperta dell’ acqua calda
“l’Italia è andata in declino economico dalla guerre italiane e l’annessione di buona parte della penisola alla Spagna” nooo davvero ammazza chi se lo sarebbe mai aspettato
poi mi fa spaccare come c’è l’insistenza nel dire “il sud era povero già all’ epoca” quando le 2 sicilie erano il pallone da calcetto delle altre potenze europee e Napoli era la seconda città più popolata d’Europa.
Menzione d’onore per torturare i dati e la retorica il più possibile per far passare l’Inghilterra come ricca aggiungerei
Magari nel paper ne parla più approfonditamente, ma mi pare incompleto parlare del tracollo economico italiano nel 16esimo secolo senza menzionare il fatto che il territorio italiano è stato, per metà di quel secolo, oggetto di guerre, saccheggi e predazioni, ovvero il periodo delle Guerre d’Italia. Prendendo questo in considerazione, come i Paesi Bassi superino l’Italia in GDP per capita non è un mistero, anzi sarebbe strano il contrario.
Per quanto riguarda la situazione del divario, cito quello che disse un mio professore universitario: “Nella Terra di Lavoro, si moriva di fame prima dell’unità, e si moriva di fame dopo l’unità”. Praticamente i neoborbonici hanno la stessa rilevanza dei terrapiattisti a livello accademico.
Questi studi che cercano d ricostruire il PIL per epoche così remote lasciano un po’ il tempo che trovano.
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