The Industrialization of Italy, 1861–1971

Abstract

At unification in 1861, the Italian peninsula was a relatively backward area at the European periphery. By 1971, Italy’s convergence on Europe’s northwestern industrial core was almost complete. This chapter describes the main features of Italy’s industrial and manufacturing growth, emphasizing the role of traditional and modern sectors. It assesses the impact of commercial and industrial policies, and analyses the country’s regional manufacturing divide. The chapter concludes with a list of the main drivers of the spread of manufacturing over the long run. It raises the question of the timing of the spread of industry from core to Italian periphery. On the eve of the Second World War, the shares of modern sectors in manufacturing were close to those of core countries. However, while Italy’s Northwest looked like an industrial region, the South was still part of the backward periphery—a divide that reduced only moderately after the war.

Extinction Risk Assessment of the Greek Endemic Flora

“…The recorded extinction rate in Greece is thus lower than Italy [ 79 ], Spain [ 90 ], other areas with Mediterranean-type climate (e.g., [ 91 ]) or global estimates [ 7 , 9 , 22 ], and cannot be attributed to lower collection effort, since Greece has been extensively botanized during the past two centuries [ 92 ], with collection intensity intensifying the past decades, which resulted in the rediscovery of many presumably extinct taxa [ 92 ]. The lower extinction rates observed in Greece might be due to extinction debt (i.e., the delayed extinction of taxa—[ 93 ]), as a result of the lower industrialization and urbanization rates of Greece compared to Italy and Spain [ 94 , 95 ] until the 1960s [ 96 ]. This situation may however change dramatically in the foreseeable future, since most Greek endemics are either very narrowly-distributed ( Supplementary Materials Table S1 ) or occur in areas highly affected by human activities ([ 38 , 49 ]— Figure 3 ).…”

Human Capital and Urban Growth in Italy, 1981–2001

“…Regional dummies should capture all‐time‐invariant geographic variables as well as regional policies that change slowly over time. Such variables are particularly meaningful for Italy where economic growth has been strictly related to location, as it also emerges from historical accounts (A'Hearn & Venables ; Gomellini & Toniolo ).…”

“…A second potential source of heterogeneity concerns geography: Italy is among the European countries which show deep regional divides, a fact which arises from different long‐run patterns (see Gomellini & Toniolo ). We investigated whether such differences might affect the relationship between human capital and employment growth, with a specific focus on the long‐standing North–South divide.…”

Toxicities that matter: Slow bureaucracy and polluting temporalities in a southern Italian city

“…Understanding these discrepancies requires acknowledging the historical premises on which industrialization took place in Taranto. Southern Italy was historically excluded from the process of industrialization that took place in the north of the country in the first half of the 20 th century (Gomellini and Toniolo, 2017). The high levels of unemployment resulting from this condition granted the fewer industrial groups that were later established in the south greater power to resist demands for environmental justice (Barca and Leonardi, 2018).…”