No abstract

Britain's 1919 introduction of a 48-hour week for industrial workers has been highlighted as a key factor depressing its relative labour productivity. This largely ignores both any potential offset to lower hours from higher hourly productivity and the fact that the 48-hour week was also introduced in almost all other industrialized nations (generally involving substantially greater reductions in hours).We examine the international context and the short-term impact on British productivity, focusing on three major export industries-coal, cotton, and iron and steel. Britain did not suffer any significant relative productivity loss in these industries, while reduced working hours are shown to have been partially compensated for by higher hourly productivity.

Using a large dataset of Italian joint-stock companies, this article analyses the networks of corporate interlocks of the major universal banks and twenty most 'central' local banks in a critical period of Italian industrialisation. The networks of the two types of banks were largely independent, with universal banks being affiliated principally to larger concerns in electricity, transport and storage, and financials; and local banks to riskier, younger and smaller firms in light manufacturing. The article then explores whether the bank-industry relationship in Italy reflected the hegemony of banks and followed a bank-control model. Our analysis does not support that view. It rather indicates that interlocking directorates were driven principally by a convergence of interests between banks (monitoring customers) and industrial firms (interested in tapping capital and credit flows), with the latter exerting a slightly higher influence over the former. This significantly differentiates Italy from Germany and the USA, where banks had a more dominant position in the corporate system.

The “historical alternatives” approach calls for research into the role of national institutions and public policies in the resilience or decline of industrial districts. Policies in support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were launched in various Western economies in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on the paradigmatic Italian case and investigates the importance of government subsidies for SMEs on firms located in a southern and a northeastern district, between 1971 and 1991. This discussion deepens our understanding of the role of national policies in the reemergence of industrial districts in the decades of the Second Industrial Divide. It also indicates the importance of firms’ utilization of subsidies and their ecosystem as complementary to the policy's effectiveness.

The chapter explores the long-run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a number of channels, analyzing the impact of imported technology. The study is based on a newly constructed dataset, over the 1861-2009 period, composed of variables related to innovation activity performance, foreign technology transfer, and domestic absorptive and innovative capability. The analysis highlights, also by econometric assessment, the significant contribution of foreign technology to innovation activity results. Machinery imports and the accumulation of technical human capital contributed positively to innovation activity; inward FDI contributed positively to productivity growth, but not to indigenous innovation activity results. Differences across channels of technology transfer and historical phases emerge, also in connection with the evolution of human capital endowment and domestic innovative capacity.