Italy and the little divergence in wages and prices: evidence from stable employment in rural areas^†

Abstract

This article presents an early modern wage index for stable rural male workers in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These wages highlight the importance of distinguishing between locations and contract types when considering historical workers’ living standards, and they speak to a longstanding debate about whether Italy's early modern downturn was purely an urban phenomenon, or an all‐embracing one. Our data lend support to the former view, since we do not detect any downturn in our early modern rural wages. This observation informs the little divergence debate. By comparing rural rather than urban wages and stable rather than casual ones, we find that annual English earnings rose from being only 10 per cent higher than those in Italy in 1650 to being a staggering 150 per cent higher in 1800. If wages reflected labour productivity, then unskilled English workers—unlike their Italian counterparts—grew increasingly productive in the run‐up to the industrial revolution.

Productividad del trabajo, salarios por pieza y beneficios en la manufactura preindustrial. La pañería de Alcoi (1585-1810)

“…El texto se divide en cuatro partes claramente diferenciadas. En la Montero, 2011;Humphries, 2013;López Losa, 2013;Andrés y Lanza, 2014González-Mariscal, 2015;Horrell et al, 2015;Humphries y Weisdorf, 2015, 2016de Pleijt y van Zanden, 2016, 2021Calderón et al, 2017;López Losa y Piquero, 2018;Stephenson, 2018Stephenson, , 2019Stephenson, , 2020Humphries y Schneider, 2019a, 2019bPérez Romero, 2019;Rota y J. Weisdorf, 2019;García-Zúñiga, 2020;García-Zúñiga y López Losa, 2021).…”

Italy’s Total Factor Productivity in a Global Economy: Growth and Spillover Effects (c. 1400–2010)

“…Second, to the parallel diffusion of innovations and modes of production of the First Industrial Revolution in the unified Italy, that, as for Great Britain one century before, could have been fostered also by a shifting of the resources of the aristocracy of the unified peninsula from traditional sectors to state sovereign bonds. The Italian gross public debt was throughout the period 1861 to 1934 around or above 80 percent of the GDP, with peaks of 120 per cent around 1900 and 160 per cent at the end of World War I(Bastasin et al 2019), whereas Italy's labour market was characterised by much lower average wages for unskilled workers compared to coeval England(Rota and Weisdorf 2021).Third, in the context of the first globalization wave of the period between 1870 and 1913, also global technology knowledge spill overs have likely been a factor playing a role in determining the size of the growth of TFP in Italy. We analyse the contribution of spill oversintended as a (common) cycle component of TFP growthin the next Section.…”