Sovereignty, Civic Capital, and Local Development. A Historical Perspective in Economic Geography

Mattia Balestra, Giulio Cainelli, Roberto Ganau, Nadiia Matsiuk, Mario Pasquato and Roberto Pierdicca

No 2504, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: We combine history with economic geography to contribute shading light on the long-run determinants of territorial development differentials in Italy. Specifically, we study the effects of historical sovereignty change on current local economic development. We measure historical sovereignty change through the yearly number of changes in sovereignty occurred in the period 1000–1861⎯that is, until the unification of Italy⎯and assess its effects on labor productivity in 2018. We estimate a negative effect of historical sovereignty change on current local economic development, and identify⎯both theoretically and empirically⎯civic capital as a plausible underlying mechanism.

Keywords: Historical sovereignty change; civic capital; local economic development; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02, Revised 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-inv and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2504.pdf Version February 2025 (application/pdf)

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:egu:wpaper:2504

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).