Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices: New Data, New Results

Abstract

We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter’s Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decline. Comparison with new construction wages for London shows that Roman workers outearned their early-modern English counterparts. This suggests that high wages alone were not enough to trigger industrialization.

Epidemics, Inequality, and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times

“…This holds even if we look closely at relevant cases: as can be seen in part B of Figure 6, real wages did not raise in Milan after the 1630 plague had caused an estimated mortality of 462 per thousand, nor in the city of Valencia where about one third of the population died of plague in 1647-48 10 . Similar conclusions, for the 1656-57 plague in central and southern Italy, have recently been reached by Rota and Weisdorf (2020) using a new series of real wages for the city of Rome.…”

“…Secondly, by causing them greater direct economic damage, for example by leading to unemployment or to significant wage reductions for low-skill workers. Indeed, the way in which preindustrial epidemics affected real wages and the labour market more generally is the focus of many recent studies (Pamuk 2007;Pamuk and Schatzmiller 2014;Fochesato 2018;Alfani and Percoco 2019;Rota and Weisdorf 2020).…”

The Effect of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic on Income Inequality: Evidence from Italy

“…Therefore, the economic crisis that followed the epidemic may have hit those contributors more heavily. Many recent studies document this asymmetric effect on real wages for pre-industrial epidemics (Pamuk and Schatzmiller, 2014;Rota and Weisdorf, 2020).…”

The Evolution of Wages in Early Modern Normandy (1600–1850)

“…wage hypothesis, put forward by Allen ( , 2015, by building new wage-series for casual unskilled labour and skilled labour in the construction sector for various European cities (e.g. Gará-Zúñiga and Lòpez Losa 2021;Rota and Weisdorf 2020;Stephenson 2018). Gary and Olsson (2020), and Rota and Weisdorf (2021) instead address this question by building wage-series based on payments made to labourers with fixed annual contracts in the countryside.…”