Lost Highway - Skills, technology and trade in Italian
economic growth, 1815-2020 - is a research project
featuring the University of Pisa, University of Siena,
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa and Università Cattolica of Milan.

 

We examine the historical roots of Italian economic decline

 

The key-hypothesis of the project is that Italian economic performance is constrained by a number of structural shortcomings that date back to the Unification period and to early industrialization.

 

The project is fundamentally data-driven and its aim is to interpret long term patterns of development by using the analytical tools of new economic history and also to explore some counterfactual scenarios using agent-based models, focusing on major historical junctures and key policy decisions.

The project team

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Background Hypothesis

This project aims at testing a general hypothesis that has been lingering in the recent debates among economic historians and economists about Italian economic growth, namely that the roots of the current economic malaise can be traced back to some specific shortcomings of the early Italian industrialization process.

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Sources and datasets

The aim of Lost Highway is to provide a major systematization of available data, as well as the creation of new series, on economic performance and its determinants: for the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the present day output: capital, labour and land endowments; real wages and skill premiums; productivity; patent data and patterns of trade. This new harmonized dataset will represent the main input for a major quantitative reassessment of Italian economic growth in the long run.
#capital  #labour  #land  #skills  #wage

Quantitative economic history, economic modelling and simulations

Using a combination of quantitative economic history and economic modelling and simulations our purpose is to test our hypothesis about the long term shortcomings of the Italian development path by collecting as much quantitative evidence as possible, given the available sources, from the end of Napoleonic wars to the current days.
 

Research Units

The Lost Highway project is a research collaboration between the University of Pisa, the University of Siena, the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa and the Catholic University of Milan.
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University of Siena

Department of Economics and Statistics

University of Pisa

Department of Economics and Management

Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

Institute of Economics

Catholic University of Milan

Department of Political Economics