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 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...

The recent work by E. Felice, Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro, il Mulino, Bologna, 2013, is rather a pamphlet than a book of economic history. In the present article, we discuss both the statistical series of regional GDP from 1871 until 2001 worked out by Felice (section 1), and 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...

The cities and towns of India constitute the world’s second largest urban system besides contributing over 50 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This phenomenon has been neglected by the existing studies and writings on urban India. By considering 59 large cities in...

With this work we try to analyse the agglomeration process in the Portuguese regions, using the New Economic Geography models. In these models the base idea is that where has increasing returns to scale in the manufactured industry and low transport costs, there is agglomeration. This work aims...

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 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...