Project data
Funding Entity: Italian Ministry of University and Research
Call: PRIN 2020
Coordinator: Università degli Studi di ROMA “La Sapienza”
UNISI Principal Investigator: Michelangelo Vasta
Department: Economics and statistics
Start date: 9 June 2022 – End date: 9 June 2025
Description
The deep history of Italy’s regional development gaps, and each region’s contribution to the country’s overall economic performance, are widely debated but often on the basis of poorly-documented narratives. This project builds a database of long-run development indicators that track regional economic performances on the Italian peninsula all the way back to the middle ages. To help explain the observed trends, the project also quantifies the fundamentals of economic growth – geography, institutions, culture, and demography – recording how these factors evolved over time. On the basis of the resulting database, the project then deploys state-of-the-art analytical tools to answer essential questions about Italy’s long-run economic performance and regional gaps. Key questions include: what regions and growth fundamentals were responsible for Italy’s late-medieval European leadership? Was the country’s subsequent economic decline an all-encompassing one, or did it only concern certain regions or sectors of the economy? Who were the regional winners and losers of Italy’s unification and why? Did the unification strengthen or weaken Italy’s position on the international arena? What can be learned from Italy’s regional past to help understand and reduce today’s regional gaps and to improve the country’s overall international position? The project offers the first-ever systematic attempt worldwide to trace a country’s regional economic developments back into the pre-modern era. The database and analytical discoveries will serve as key reference points in future debates about the origins and long-term evolution of Italy’s regional gaps alongside the country’s overall economic prospects.
This project has received funding from the Ministry of University and Research PRIN programme