The Age Distribution of the Labour Force as Evidence of Prior Production Movements: The Italian Data for 1911 and the Long Swing in Investment from Unification to the Great War

Roberto Pezzuto

Rivista di storia economica, 2019, issue 3, 249-268

Abstract: Data on the age distribution of the labour force, by activity, appear in numerous early twentieth century European censuses; but economic historians seem never to have explored them. This paper provides an initial examination of the age-distribution data in the Italian census of 1911, showing how they shed light on various aspects of the economy of the day, and on its preceding path. A point of particular interest is that these data reflect the long cycle in construction, and in the production of construction materials. They further suggest that the long cycle of the engineering industry documented by its aggregate metal consumption was indeed present in the production of constructionrelated hardware, but notably absent from the production of machinery and, derivatively, industrial investment. This last point denies theempirical premise of the extant interpretations of Italy’s post-Unification industrial growth; but it sits well with the new disaggregated time-series estimates of the engineering industry’s product.

Keywords: demographic trends; geographic labour mobility; job; occupational; and intergenerational mobility; manufacturing and construction in Europe: pre-1913 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1410/98219 (application/pdf)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1410/98219 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:mul:jrkmxm:doi:10.1410/98219:y:2019:i:3:p:249-268

Access Statistics for this article

Rivista di storia economica is currently edited by P.L. Ciocca, G. Federico, G. Toniolo (resp.)

More articles in Rivista di storia economica from Società editrice il Mulino
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().