Italian Entrepreneurship: Conjectures and Evidence from a Historical Perspective

This paper is the first product of an ongoing research on the determinants and the role of entrepreneurship in Italian economic development. Its primary aim is the creation of a data-set of Italian entrepreneurs for the period encompassed between the Unification of the Kingdom (1861) and the end of the XXth century. The main source of the research is a collection of 390 entrepreneurial biographies, prepared for an ongoing Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs. The first part of the paper presents a descriptive analysis of the main peculiarities of the country’s entrepreneurship on the basis of a few standard variables traditionally used in economic analysis. The second one refines the descriptive approach through a methodology – Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis – usual by now in standard statistics, yet not very familiar to scholars in economic and/or business history. This has allowed us to single out a few entrepreneurial typologies of the history of Italian capitalism which partly confirm the “traditional” features already emphasized by historiography; such as the prominence of northern entrepreneurs, the strong relations both with own and partner’s families, the almost total absence of female entrepreneurs and an essentially middle-class rooted entrepreneurship. However a few novel interesting aspects emerge, the most surprising being the good level of formal education of the sample: a neat majority (60%) has a medium/high degree and almost one third an university degree.