The fruits of disaggregation: the general engineering industry in Italy, 1861-1913

In post-Unification Italy the cyclical movements of the economy largely reflected those in the production of durable goods. The engineering industry has been seen as one that transformed metal into machines: its metal consumption suggests that investment in machinery followed the Kuznets-cycle long swing, as construction did, that domestic production ever dominated the domestic market, and that changes in protection didn't matter. New, disaggregated timeseries estimates force a radical revision of these long-held views. Far more metal was turned into (ever-protected) hardware than into machines: the long cycle in aggregate "engineering" was not so much parallel to, as simply part of, the cycle in construction. Investment in machinery grew altogether more steadily than investment in infrastructure, with more numerous but far more modest cycles (and a heretofore unrecognized peak in 1907). All the extant interpretations of Italy's industrial progress in the period at hand turn on the nonexistent long swing in industrial investment, and they all collapse together. The domestic production of machinery, initially very small, reacted strongly to increases in net protection: the conventional view of the impact of the tariff is also to be jettisoned.