Napoleonic administrative reforms and development in the Italian Mezzogiorno

Giulio Cainelli, Carlo Ciccarelli () and Roberto Ganau

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study how changes in a country’s administrative hierarchy affect development at the city level. We exploit the 1806 Napoleonic administrative reform implemented in the Kingdom of Naples as a historical experiment to assess whether district capitals endowed with supra-municipal administrative functions gained an urban development premium compared with non-capital cities. We find that district capitals recorded a population growth premium throughout the nineteenth century (1828–1911) and experienced higher industrialization both before and after the Italian unification (1861) compared with non-capital cities. We explain our results through mechanisms related to public goods provision and transport network accessibility.

JEL-codes: J01 N0 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2025-12-23
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in The Journal of Economic History, 23, December, 2025, pp. 1-36. ISSN: 0022-0507

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/130883/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Napoleonic Administrative Reforms and Development in the Italian Mezzogiorno (2025)
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:ehl:lserod:130883

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().