Italian Industrial Production, 1861 1913: A Statistical Reconstruction. F. The Engineering Industries

This paper is the sixth section of Italian Industrial Production, 1861 1913: A Statistical Reconstruction (in progress). It documents the derivation, from the historical sources, of the 26 time series that trace the physical product of the engineering industry, of the corresponding estimates of value added per unit at 1911 prices, and of the further 19 series that trace the industry’s maintenance activity. The shipbuilding and rail-guided-vehicles industries are well documented. The naval-construction series are built up from micro-data, the merchant-construction series from production data; maintenance is indexed by the corresponding fleets, allowing for trade in the maintenance of merchant vessels. The rail-guided-vehicle new production series are built up from abundant data on units acquired, converting these to weight and deducting imports; maintenance is indexed by the weight of the stocks in service (and, in the case of railway vehicles, annual mileage). The rest of the industry is poorly documented. The new production of fabricated metal goods, general equipment, and precision equipment is estimated, together with the corresponding maintenance, using census data to document the composition of the industry at periodic benchmarks, stock (and usage) indices to track maintenance, trade data to document the short-term movements of the various markets for new goods, and aggregate metal consumption as an overall constraint.