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Rethinking the take-off: the role of services in the new economic history of Italy (1861–1951)

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Abstract

The article discusses the new series of services GDP for Italy (1861–1951), which have been incorporated in the Italian historical accounts. Three main results emerge. First, the new historical estimates of services appear to be more reliable than the previous ones, published by Istat (Indagine statistica sullo sviluppo del reddito nazionale dell’Italia dal 1861 al 1956. Annali di Statistica, Istat, Rome, 1957). Second, the differences between the estimates of services make up for most of the differences observed between the old GDP series and the new one, and they have a significant impact on the performance of the Italian economy, also in international comparisons. Third, cointegration analysis suggests the presence of a significant break at the end of the nineteenth century, in line with industry: since then, the traditional services lagged behind, while the innovative ones (and since the Great War also social/collective services) shared the same rising trend as industry. This result confirms the idea of a «great transformation» of the Italian economy, first pioneered by Gerschenkron, which began at the end of the nineteenth century arguably as a consequence of institutional and political changes.

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Notes

  1. Western Europe is composed of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, plus Italy itself; if we included also Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal, the Italian per capita GDP was even higher the whole of Western Europe, by around 2–3%. In 1981 and 1982, and then again in 1991 and 1992, in PPP per capita GDP Italy even surpassed, although only for a brief time, the UK. All the estimates are, again, at PPP 1990 international dollars (Maddison 2010; Bolt and van Zanden 2014).

  2. Even though, arguably, not the final outcome. For a recent, further refinement of the series of industrial production in the liberal age, see Fenoaltea (2015).

  3. A partial exception is the banking sector (De Bonis and Silvestrini 2014), which is the only one not estimated by Battilani, Felice and Zamagni, but by De Bonis et al. (2012).

  4. A part from Gerschenkron and Fenoaltea, who used as keystones of their arguments their own respective estimates of Italy’s industrial production, early contributions to this debate include Romeo (1956, 1958), Bonelli (1978), Cafagna (1983a, b, 1989), Toniolo (1988), Zamagni (1990, 1993).

  5. An alternative estimate was proposed in Malanima (2006); it is at present borders and estimates the service sector by linearly interpolating the Istat’s share for services in 1861 with the Zamagni and Battilani’s new shares for 1891 and 1911.

  6. Previously, a GDP series by Rossi et al. (1993) had incorporated the new 1911 benchmark and linked it to a new 1951 benchmark produced by Golinelli and Monterastelli (1990).

  7. In more detail, Maddison (1991) used Istat-Vitali 1938-price series for agriculture and services and all the most updated 1911-price series by Fenoaltea available at that time (Fenoaltea 1969a, 1982, 1987, 1988b, c) for industry: all of these series were rescaled at 1870 prices through Istat (1957) current-price figures.

  8. Being out the focus of the paper, agriculture is here omitted to save space; for the interwar years; however, the new index mirrors Istat-Vitali; for the liberal age, differences are instead remarkable (Federico 2003, p. 370).

  9. On this latter, it is worth adding that Fenoaltea’s claim that the 1871 benchmark is «apparently undocumented» (Fenoaltea 2017, p. 7) is only partially true (for services, see Battilani et al. 2014 and the references therein).

  10. For all the figures of sectoral productivity (calculated on the series at constant prices), see Table 7.2 in Broadberry et al. (2013, p. 192).

  11. In what follows, only a general outline of the methodology is provided. For full details on sources and methods, see Battilani et al (2014) and, limitedly to the banking sector (part of the financial sector), De Bonis et al. (2012).

  12. These original series, from Ragioneria Generale dello Stato, were published only at the end of the 1960 s (Ministero del Tesoro 1969).

  13. For the income coming from private buildings, a third approach was used: the value added series was estimated by multiplying the total number of rooms—from Fenoaltea (1987) for the years 1861–1913, from Istat-Vitali (Ercolani 1969) for the following years—by the average rent per room; this was estimated from a variety of sources for benchmark years and then interpolated.

  14. For further details on how margins have been estimated, see Battilani et al. (2014). See also Zamagni (1992, pp. 192–198) and Zamagni and Battilani (2000, pp. 251–252, 276–277, 321–325).

  15. For all these series at current prices, see “Statistical appendix”.

  16. It was impossible to ascertain how many lawyers and notaries belonged to producer services, how many to personal/consumer services—as it is indeed even today. Therefore, these were allocated according to the relative shares of the two macro-categories (net of lawyers and notaries). In other words, we make the hypothesis that the share of lawyers and notaries going to producer services instead than to personal/consumer services is proportional to the relative importance of the sector, compared to personal/consumer services (just to have an idea, the share of producer services is 57% in 1861, 59% in 1951). The same procedure is used to allocate the value added of trade unions and of other bodies between producer services and social/collective services. In all of these cases, however, figures are small and do not change the broad picture.

  17. Concerning maritime navigation, due to the estimate procedure sail and steam navigation could not be separated from one another.

  18. For a broader view of innovation in services, and some comparative analyses too, see Miles (1994), Amable and Palombarini (1998), Kang (2006).

  19. The usual techniques used to search for structural breaks are ineffective, to our scope, not only for the use of current prices, but also for the consequences of the two World Wars and of the crises and turmoil of the interwar years.

  20. They are available upon request.

  21. Engle et al. (1987). I am aware that, being non-normally distributed, the OLS estimators can yield biased results and thus should be handled with caution. Alternative estimators, namely the dynamic OLS (see Stock and Watson 1993), or the non-stationary vector autoregressive process developed by Søren (1988), could not be used for our purpose being strongly dependant on the number of observations.

  22. The variables have been pre-tested for the presence of unit roots, with the inclusion of both trend and intercept, in order to check if they are integrated of the same order: the common unit root is present with 1-lag in all the series but two (producer and social/collective services), where it appears with 2-lags; when running the Engle–Granger augmented Dickey–Fuller test for 2-lags in the cases of producer and social/collective services, changes are minimal.

  23. When measured at constant prices, the two series appear to be slightly more cointegrated, but the difference is modest and, for the series at constant prices, the R2 is smaller (the test at constant prices looks less reliable). To our scope, it made little sense to use Fenoaltea’s new series at constant prices, since they are limited to the 1861–1913 years: those series, however, increase the acceleration of the mid-1890s, in comparison with the series used here (Fenoaltea 2017, pp. 63–64); their use should therefore corroborate the main finding we are going to discuss.

  24. But our estimator is the less dependent on the number of observations (see footnote 21).

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Acknowledgements

I am in debt with Patrizia Battilani and Vera Zamagni, for crucial advice on a previous version of this article and, above all, for the years we have worked together on this subject; the comments by two anonymous referees have helped me to improve the article; financial aid from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government, Project HAR2016-76814-C2-1-P (AEI/FEDER UE), is gratefully acknowledged.

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    Emanuele Felice

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Statistical appendix

Statistical appendix

1.1 Italy’s new value-added series of services

See Table 2.

Table 2 Italy’s value added of services at current prices, 1861–1951 (mln lire, at historical borders)
Full size table

1.1.1 Note on the estimates at present borders

By definition, the new original series estimated at sub-sectoral level are all at current prices and at historical borders. To standardize the figures at present borders, in most of the cases the usual coefficients by Istat (1957) and Vitali (1969) have been used. These in turn were derived from the ratio between the population at present borders and the population at historical borders: 1.18 from 1861 to 1866; 1.06 from 1867 to 1870; 1.025 from 1871 to 1919; 0.99 from 1920 to 1947. This methodology is based upon the hypothesis that the extra territories scored, in each sector, a per capita value added in line with the Italian average. Only in one case the available data allowed us to be more precise: rail-guided transportation, where the difference between the railway mileage at present borders and the one at current borders has been employed.

1.2 The reclassification services

See Table 3.

Table 3 Reclassifying services: Italy’s value added of services according to their final destination and technological innovation, 1861–1951 (mln lire at current prices, historical borders)
Full size table

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Felice, E. Rethinking the take-off: the role of services in the new economic history of Italy (1861–1951). Cliometrica 13, 405–442 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-018-0179-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-018-0179-z

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