Labor shares and inequality: insights from Italian economic history, 1895–19701

‘A paradise for profiteers’? The importance and treatment of profits during the first world war

Giacomo Gabbuti

European Review of Economic History, 2021, vol. 25, issue 2, 355-378

Abstract: This article develops theoretical and practical motivations for studying the functional distribution of income in the past. Italy is adopted as a case study, because of the availability of long-run estimates on personal inequality and of the long-lasting incidence of self-employment. New labor shares for 1895–1970 show Italian workers accruing a low share of income until 1945; by the end of the 1950s, they rapidly converged to the European average. Italian history shows that functional income distribution deepens our understanding of long- and short-run distributional trends and makes a compelling case for approaching inequality by combining diverse sources and methodologies.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/heaa010 (application/pdf)
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:oup:ereveh:v:25:y:2021:i:2:p:355-378.

Access Statistics for this article

European Review of Economic History is currently edited by Christopher M. Meissner, Steven Nafziger and Alessandro Nuvolari

More articles in European Review of Economic History from European Historical Economics Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().