This paper presents new estimates of Italian regional GDP for the years 1871, 1881 1891, 1901, 1911, 1938 and 1951. This allows us to draw a long term picture of regional development of the country, from the years following national unification to the advent of Euro in 2001.

In this chapter I discuss historical estimates of GDP at both the national and the regional level, and their application for assessing economic performance in modern times. Having been invented in (and conceived for) industrial capitalist societies, GDP has stronger informative power in those...

The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy's regions over the long term, i.e. roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day.  The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in order...

The article investigates the relationship between GDP and prices in Italy in the long-run, from the country's Unification (1861) up to present day. By using the new national accounts data, over the period 1861–2012, we were able to make Italy the third country to have a historical test of the...

This work presents and discusses some of the most important social indicators (height, education, life expectancy and human development index), referring to the Italian regions for the period spanning from 1871 to 2001. According to the data, there was a catching-up process of Southern Italy...

The article analyses the new estimates of regional value added in Italy, in benchmark years from 1891 to 2001, by decomposing them into activity rates and per worker productivity, in agriculture, industry, and services. The impact of activity rates and per worker productivity on the pattern of...

This article reconsiders the growth of Italian industry from the First World War to the eve of the economic miracle, with the aid of sector-specific new value-added series, at three different price-bases. The new estimates reduce growth during the First World War, making the Italian case...

The article is composed of two sections. The first one is a critical review of the three main alternative indices to GDP which were proposed in the last decades – the Human Development Index (HDI), the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), and the Happy Planet Index (HPI) – which is made on the...

The chapter presents up-to-date estimates of Italy’s regional GDP, with the present borders, in ten-year benchmarks from 1871 to 2001, and proposes a new interpretative hypothesis based on long-lasting socio-institutional differences. The inverted U-shape of income inequality is confirmed:...