Between 1981 and 2001 Italy became a services-oriented economy. The loss of jobs in manufacturing was less pronounced in Italy’s organized industrial districts than in the rest of the country. The branches of manufacturing that typify the districts outperformed the others in terms of...

This paper examines how the concept of industrial district, widely recognised as an Italian construct, took shape. It assesses to what extent the concept was tailored to fit the peculiar trait of the Italian economic development, as is claimed by some international authors, and to what extent it...

The paper proposes a new geography of nested economic areas that shape the Italian economy. These economic areas, named economic regions and economic macro-regions, are an upper tier integration of Local Labour Systems (LLS) obtained using a Community Detection algorithm called INFOMAP. This...