Authors: Guglielmo Barone, David Chilosi, Carlo Ciccarelli, Guido de Blasio
Italy was unified in 1861. The country’s unification was the result of the Italian Risorgimento, the political and social movement that developed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era and culminated in the consolidation of the existing states into the Kingdom of Italy (Banti and Ginsborg, 2007). Unification led to a large domestic market regulated by shared institutions, as well as public investments in transport and education.
A debate 160 years in the making
Since soon after the inception of the new nation-state, a debate started on whether the Italian unification contributed to the country’s dual development – which saw the South persistently lagging behind the Centre-North. This debate is still unsettled. A pessimist view holds that post-unification economic policies favored industrialization and development in the North at the expense of the South (Nitti, 1900; Gramsci, 1975; Romeo, 1959). In contrast, other literature suggests that unification benefited the Southern economy as it brought market integration (A’Hearn and Rueda, 2023), free trade (Lupo, 1990; Ciccarelli and Fenoaltea, 2013), and public investments in infrastructure and education (Felice, 2019, Pescosolido, 2019).
It is important to underscore that the literature has almost exclusively relied on (descriptive) empirical approaches based on post-unification trends. A handful of studies carry out before-after unification comparisons of Italy’s macro-areas (Daniele and Malanima, 2007; de Oliveira and Guerriero, 2018; Ciccarelli and Weisdorf, 2019). No paper so far discusses post-unification development trajectories within a rigorous counterfactual framework: what would have been the trajectory of economic development in both areas if there had been no unification?
A synthetic control approach
A recent paper contributes to this debate by estimating the impact of unification on standard indicators of development, agricultural shares of the labor force, railways density and literacy rates, with a well-established counterfactual methodology: the synthetic control method (SCM henceforth; Abadie et al., 2010). It draws on a newly compiled cross-country historical database covering the decades before and after unification (from 1840 to 1911).
No generalized benefits
The results suggest that neither the South nor the Centre-North gained generalized benefits from the unified state. According to the SCM’s analysis, unification delayed industrialization not only in the South, but also in the Centre-North. At the same time, there were asymmetric beneficial effects of public investments: unification increased the diffusion of railways only in the South, while it resulted in increased literacy only in the Centre-North. Overall, we fail to detect significant effects of unification on the South vs Centre-North regional divide.
Interpretation
These findings are in line with the recent literature on the Risorgimento that sees Italian unification as determined by cultural movements rather than economic convenience (Patriarca and Riall, 2011, Banti, 2020). They also fit the view that there were only relatively small gains from a larger market because the two areas had both a comparative advantage in the production of primary commodities for the industrializing countries of Northern Europe (Cafagna, 1989). Thus the reduction of protectionism that followed consolidation seems to have favored agricultural exports, while delaying the process of structural transformation.
The results also highlight that substantial (though asymmetric) effects of the consolidation on public investments in railways and education were not matched by contemporaneous gains in industrialization. This dissonance is consistent with the argument that Italian nation-building diverted public investments from where they were most efficient to where they were politically necessary to secure the consent of local populations (Cafagna, 1989).
References
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