An Age of Decline. Product and Income in Eighteenth-Nineteenth Century Italy

I will start with the movement of wages. I will present complete series of wages from 1700 until 1861 - partly based on unpublished archive documents (§ 1) - for both northern and southern Italy, and both the industrial and agricultural sectors. continuous annual series for this long period have never been compiled before. I will then try to derive from these series an estimate of the Italian product, both per capita and aggregate, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will then link this estimate to the series on product in post-Unification Italy until 1913 to obtain a long-term outline (§ 2). It will thus be possible to follow the movement of the Italian economy over two centuries, highlighting Italy's eighteenth century decline and slow late nineteenth century recovery. I will try to model and explain this long phase of the Italian economy in the last paragraph (§ 3). The old and new materials on which I have based this new perspective on the Italian economy are presented and commented in the appendix, together with the statistical methods I employed.