Ma l'agricoltura meridionale era davvero arretrata?

The conventional wisdom used to consider agricultural backwardness as one of the main causes of the North-South gap. In recent years, historians have contested this view. This paper supplies the first estimates of Total Factor Productivity in 1911, with an extrapolation to the whole period 1891-1951. The productivity was higher in the North, and the gap, initially quite small, has been widening all over the period. These results are more consistent with the conventional wisdom than with the revisionist view.