Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these...

In 150 years, the trends in regional disparities in economic development within Italy have differed depending on whether they are gauged by longitude or by latitude. The disparities between western and eastern regions first widened and then closed; the North-South gap, by contrast, remains the...

This paper explores the interactions between external trade and regional disparities in the Italian economy since unification. It argues that the advantage of the North was initially based on natural advantage (in particular the endowment of water, intensive in silk production). From 1880...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it provides a stylised description of the Catalan industrial path of the period 1830-1861. Second, it reviews the evolution of the Catalan industry in the Spanish context and, thus, can serve to describe the relative importance of the Catalan industrial...

How can agricultural inheritance traditions affect structural change and economic development in rural areas? The most prominent historical traditions are primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits the whole farm, and equal partition, where land is split and each heir inherits an equal share....

The paper examines regional determinants of grain price convergence in the Russian Empire in 1880-1913. I consider data of two levels of spatial aggregation: province and newly constructed district price data. I investigate that regional production factors, i.e. crop yield, difference in land...