 The fruits of disaggregation: the general engineering industry in Italy, 1861-1913No 358, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Abstract: In post-Unification Italy the cyclical movements of the economy largely reflected those in the production of durable goods. The engineering industry has been seen as one that transformed metal into machines: its metal consumption suggests that investment in machinery followed the Kuznets-cycle long swing, as construction did, that domestic production ever dominated the domestic market, and that changes in protection didn't matter. New, disaggregated timeseries estimates force a radical revision of these long-held views. Far more metal was turned into (ever-protected) hardware than into machines: the long cycle in aggregate "engineering" was not so much parallel to, as simply part of, the cycle in construction. Investment in machinery grew altogether more steadily than investment in infrastructure, with more numerous but far more modest cycles (and a heretofore unrecognized peak in 1907). All the extant interpretations of Italy's industrial progress in the period at hand turn on the nonexistent long swing in industrial investment, and they all collapse together. The domestic production of machinery, initially very small, reacted strongly to increases in net protection: the conventional view of the impact of the tariff is also to be jettisoned. Keywords: method; engineering; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wpaper:358 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.