IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ssa/lemwps/2015-18.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Where Do We Go From Here? Market Access and Regional Development in Italy (1871-1911)

Author

Listed:
  • Anna Missiaia

Abstract

Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these regional differentials. We first quantify market access of the Italian regions for benchmark years from 1871 to 1911 following Harris (1954). We then use these estimates to study the causal link between GDP per capita and market potential following Head and Mayer (2011). The main result of this paper is that only domestic market potential, which represents the home market, shows a "traditional" North-South divide. When international markets are introduced, the South does not appear to lag behind. Regression analysis confirms that market potential is a strong determinant of GDP per capita only in its domestic formulation. This suggests that the home market in this period mattered far more for growth than the international markets, casting new light on one of the classical explanations to the North-South divide.

Suggested Citation

  • Anna Missiaia, 2015. "Where Do We Go From Here? Market Access and Regional Development in Italy (1871-1911)," LEM Papers Series 2015/18, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    • Handle: RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2015/18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/files/2015-18.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Zamagni, Vera, 1997. "The Economic History of Italy 1860-1990," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198292890.
    2. Fenoaltea,Stefano, 2014. "The Reinterpretation of Italian Economic History," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107658080, October.
    3. Martinez-Galarraga, Julio, 2012. "The determinants of industrial location in Spain, 1856–1929," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 49(2), pages 255-275.
    4. Nicholas Crafts, 2005. "Market potential in British regions, 1871-1931," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(9), pages 1159-1166.
    5. Critz, José Morilla & Olmstead, Alan L. & Rhode, Paul W., 1999. "“Horn of Plenty”: The Globalization of Mediterranean Horticulture and the Economic Development of Southern Europe, 1880–1930," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 59(02), pages 316-352, June.
    6. Fenoaltea, Stefano, 2003. "Peeking Backward: Regional Aspects of Industrial Growth in Post-Unification Italy," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 63(04), pages 1059-1102, December.
    7. H. Hanson, Gordon, 2005. "Market potential, increasing returns and geographic concentration," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 1-24, September.
    8. Alexander Klein & Nicholas Crafts, 2012. "Making sense of the manufacturing belt: determinants of U.S. industrial location, 1880--1920," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(4), pages 775-807, July.
    9. Keith Head & Thierry Mayer, 2004. "Market Potential and the Location of Japanese Investment in the European Union," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(4), pages 959-972, November.
    10. Vittorio Daniele & Paolo Malanima, 2007. "Il prodotto delle regioni e il divario Nord-Sud in Italia (1861-2004)," Rivista di Politica Economica, SIPI Spa, vol. 97(2), pages 267-316, March-Apr.
    11. Antoni Estevadeordal & Brian Frantz & Alan M. Taylor, 2002. "The Rise and Fall of World Trade, 1870-1939," NBER Working Papers 9318, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. K.H. Midelfart & H.G. Overman & S.J. Redding & A.J. Venables, 2000. "The location of European industry," European Economy - Economic Papers 2008 - 2015 142, Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Domini, Giacomo, 2016. "Patents, exhibitions and markets for innovation in the early twentieth century: Evidence from Turin 1911 International Exhibition," MERIT Working Papers 061, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    2. Emanuele Felice, 2017. "The Roots of a Dual Equilibrium: GDP, Productivity and Structural Change in the Italian Regions in the Long-run (1871-2011)," Quaderni di storia economica (Economic History Working Papers) 40, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    3. Gabriele Cappelli & Emanuele Felice & Julio Martínez-Galarraga & Daniel Tirado, 2018. "Still a long way to go: decomposing income inequality across Italy’s regions, 1871 – 2011," Working Papers 0123, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic Geography; Economic History of Italy; Market Potential;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2015/18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: () or (Rebekah McClure). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/labssit.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.