The author of this paper intends to compare two industrial territories from western France: Chateau-Renault and Surgères. Chateau-Renault is a tanning center, and the city of Surgères houses a vast dairy. The industries of both areas deal with products of animal origins deriving from...

Despite the fact that in 2011 Italy will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its political unification, geographical disparities stand out as a prominent characteristic of the country. The paper estimates the trend of the cost-of-living differentials across regions in the half-century after the...

This paper deals with the role played by the Laboratorio Tessile of Elda Cecchele in the production of fabric for fashion clothing and accessories in the 50s and 60s. The Laboratorio supplied many important Italian stylists, in particular Giuliana Camerino and Franca Polacco in Venice. The...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...

Over the recent decades, scholars and planning practitioners have developed strategies for directed urban decentralization, which aim at the optimization of urban commuting patterns by allowing households to locate closer to job opportunities. However, given ongoing changes in the socioeconomic...

This paper’s objective is to take a more in-depth look at, and encourage debate on, the mechanism that were in force in the birth, growth and crisis of traditional electrical systems. The merit of Arteta, as with other SMEs in the electrical sector, resided in its ability to provide, almost...

The study of the Irati hydroelectric company aims to show some of the business strategies behind the first stages of the development of electricity in Spain and, in turn, pose new questions regarding the factors and conditioning elements of the country’s regional industrialization processes....

Abstract (English) In recent years there have been major advances in our historical knowledge of regional disparities in Italy; as a consequence, the debate on the causes of the North-South divide (and thus, ultimately, on strategies and possibilities to overcome it) has also revived. By mainly...

The Lisbon Treaty entered into force on December 1, 2009, marking a new level of EU’s initiatives on institutional change and policy reforms in 2000’s. The purpose of this study is to provide an outline of the changes in the institutional structure of EU with the Lisbon Treaty, considering...

The economic transition characterizing the process of European industrialization in the 19th century was concentrated on regions rather than on states. In the first half of the 19th century, the region of Aachen (in the west of Prussia) pioneered on the territory of the German states and...