Italy and the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from Stable Employment in Rural Areas

Jacob Weisdorf and Mauro Rota

No 14652, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We provide a first-ever long-run index of wages of stable rural workers in early-modern Tuscany. These wages speak to two longstanding debates. The first concerns whether Italy’s early-modern downturn was an urban phenomenon only or an all-embracing one. Our data lend support to the former, since we do not detect any downturn in our early-modern rural wages. The second debate concerns whether high-waged workers prompted the Industrial Revolution. Earlier studies in this debate have been criticised for comparing urban wages when early factories emerged in rural areas. By comparing rural wages, we find that English labour cost only 10 per cent more than their Italian counterparts in 1650, but a staggering 150 per cent more in 1800. The revised timing of the divergence between England and Italy, and its overlap with England’s early mechanisation, raise a significant identification problem. Did high wages encourage mechanisation, or did mechanisation boost wages?

Keywords: Stable employment; Economic growth; Industrial revolution; Great divergence; Living standards; Prices; Wages; Wage premia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 J3 J4 J8 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14652 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14652

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14652

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().