Since it became a united country, Italy was looked at with keen eyes by foreign economists, economic historians and policy makers. They wanted to see whether it would be possible for the economy of a country which had in the XVII and XVIII century regressed to the role of agricultural raw...

After the Golden Age, Italy experienced increasing difficulties in adjusting its economy to the changing external context and to the requirements for sustaining catch-up growth at a higher level of economic development. The adjustment issue is common to advanced countries but the difficulties...

A great deal of new quantitative research has been produced over the last three decades which has radically changed the received interpretation of Italian economic development. Against this backdrop, the Bank of Italy, Istat and the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", together with academics from...

The paper carries out a review of the literature dealing with the Italian growth poles policy, from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. The text is divided into three parts. The 4th Siderurgical Center and the start of the Alfasud car plant are the objects of the first two parts; the third part...

This paper offers the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics within Italy's industrial sector over the period 1911-1951 and of their links with competition policy. By relying on a newly compiled dataset and on fresh labour productivity estimates, we find that the earlier...

The research presented here is part of a wider project of revision of historical national accounts in Italy between 1891 and 1970. The reconstruction for 1951-1970 relies on a previous estimate of inter-sectoral (input-output) matrix for 1951 and on a new estimate of inter-sectoral matrix for...

Building on a new dataset on Italian banks and other financial institutions from 1861 to 2011, the novelty of this paper is to examine the patterns of the main items of bank's balance sheets, such as deposits, capital and reserves, bonds issued, bonds held in portfolio, and loans for a period of...

We exploit the new historical national accounts data for Italy over the period 1861-2010, built by Banca d'Italia and Istat, with the collaboration of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the first part of the paper, a thorough study of the new data's statistical properties is presented...

This paper examines the impact of stock market fluctuations on money demand in Italy taking a long-run perspective. The empirical findings suggest that stock market fluctuations contribute to explain temporary movements in the liquidity preference, rather than its secular patterns. Overall, a...

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the main macroeconomic aggregates (both real and credit aggregates), and the monetary policy response during the most severe recessions experienced by the Italian economy. This descriptive study focuses mainly on the last forty years, a period for...