A Sectoral Analysis of Italy's Development, 1861-2011

Stephen Broadberry, Claire Giordano and Francesco Zollino ()
Additional contact information
Francesco Zollino: Banca d’Italia, Economic Outlook and Monetary Policy Department

No 20, Quaderni di storia economica (Economic History Working Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Italy’s economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d’Italia estimates of GDP by sector, this paper evaluates the different labour productivity growth trends within the Italian economy’s sectors, as well as the contribution of structural change to productivity growth. Italy’s performance is then set in an international context: a comparison of sectoral labour productivity growth rates and levels within a selected sample of countries (UK, US, Germany, Japan, India) allows us to better time, quantify and gauge the causes of Italy’s catching-up process and subsequent more recent slowdown. Finally, the paper analyses the proximate sources of Italy’s growth, relative to the other countries, in a standard growth accounting framework, in an attempt also to disentangle the contribution of both total factor productivity growth and capital deepening to the country’s labour productivity dynamics.

Keywords: Labour productivity; sectoral disaggregation; international comparison; growth accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N10 N30 O47 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/quaderni ... .htmlpage.language=1 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:workqs:qse_20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Quaderni di storia economica (Economic History Working Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().