A first edition of the present book was published in 2011, in the context of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the political Unification of Italy (In ricchezza e in povertà. Il benessere degli italiani dall'Unità a oggi, Bologna, Il Mulino). This new English edition is not a mere translation of the former publication. Three new chapters, on Migration, Wealth, and Human Development, have been added to the previous 11; each chapter includes new materials and new references; whenever possible the chronology comprises the most recent years; the Statistical Appendix (pp. 547–89) has been revised and updated with new series. The English edition is actually a new book and replaces the previous Italian volume. In this edition, as in the first, Giovanni Vecchi is both the editor of the book and the co-author of all 14 chapters; each of them written with one or more of the 18 scholars cooperating with him: Brian A’Hearn, Nicola Amendola, Vincenzo Atella, Alessandro Brunetti, Luigi Cannari, Stefano Chianese, Francesco Cinnirella, Giovanni D’Alessio, Emanuele Felice, Silvia Francisci, Giacomo Gabbuti, Matteo Gomellini, Lucia Latino, Cormac Ó Gráda, Mariacristina Rossi, Fernando Salsano, Marina Sorrentino, and Gianni Toniolo.
Several books dealing with Italian economic history since the Unification are already available. Among recent examples is The Italian Economy since Unification, edited by G. Toniolo and published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. The book by Vecchi also covers the entire parabola of Italian economic history from pre-modern lack of growth, in the first two decades after 1861, to present-day lack of growth. Compared to similar works, however, the perspective of the present book is different and original: GDP and productivity play a relatively marginal role. The center stage is occupied by the various dimensions of wellbeing and their changes: from nutrition, height, and education, to child labor, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability. The wide exploitation of a specific source already known, but marginally utilized, is also new, that is, the 20,000 household budgets covering the years 1855–1965 (Ch. 13). This main source is used in several chapters and particularly in the most innovative, the eighth, on Inequality, written by Vecchi with N. Amendola. Both for the approach and the basic source, the present work is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the Italian economy over the last 150 years. No similar book exists for other European countries.
We could summarize the core issue of this work by saying that its central concerns are growth in wellbeing and inequalities in growth among social strata and among regions. During the long transition of Modern Growth, Italian per capita GDP rose by about 13 times (Table 7.A1, in the Appendix). Nutrition, health, and education improved remarkably, while absolute poverty fell from 40–45 percent of the population in 1861 to 4.5 percent in 2008. A distinct improvement in all of the indicators occurred in the decades 1950–1970, followed by a slowing down and some backward steps in poverty, inequality, and rates of income growth during the recent crisis. In the chapter on Human Development, the authors try to quantify these changes in wellbeing with the elaboration of two Indices of Human Development. The HDI—including income, life expectancy, literacy, and enrolment rates—increased 5.5 times from 1861 to 2013; whenever, following the methodology of Freedom House (pp. 488–90), democracy is included as an indicator for political rights and civil liberties, the rise has been 4.4 times. However, in this book on Measuring Wellbeing, the authors are critical of the measures of human development; deeply biased—they say—by the preferences of their creators (p. 454). It is better, in their view, to look at the dynamics of any indicator than to try a synthetic quantification.
Rise in human wellbeing spread unequally both among social strata and among regions. In this book, as in many recent contributions, the reconstruction of inequality seems to contradict the well-known view by Simon Kuznets, or “Mr. Kuznets’ Tyranny,” as the authors write (p. 319). No inverted U curve is discovered in the period of Italian economic modernization. Inequality is high at the beginning of the new Italian nation, with a Gini index between 45 and 50 percent in the decades 1861–1931. The value of the index diminishes fast between 1961 and 1991, reaching 30 percent and rises again from the 1990s on. Thus, decline in inequality coincides with the high rates of GDP growth and its recovery with the slowdown and recent crisis.
Particular attention is devoted to geographic inequalities, that is North-South disparities in development; a classical theme when dealing with modern Italy. Some more or less remarkable diversity is found between the North and the Mezzogiorno in all dimensions of wellbeing, from nutrition, health, literacy, poverty, migration, and wealth to human development. As is well-known, the North-South disparity in income increased from the end of the nineteenth century and reached a peak in the years immediately following WWII. It then diminished until about 1975, but rose again and is still wide nowadays. According to the authors of Ch. 7 on Income, a disparity of about 15 percent in income per capita between North and South already existed in the aftermath of the Unification. In the stimulating and novel last chapter on the Cost of Living, we discover, however, that a disparity in prices between North and South of around 15 percent certainly existed from WWI onwards until today, and probably since the formation of the new state (as suggested on pp. 537–39). It is true that “by correcting GDP to allow for differences in purchasing power does not change the key features of the historical picture”(p. 280), that is, the overall trend of the North-South disparity. However, since immediately after the Unification the North-South inequality in incomes per capita was certainly more modest than later, the disparity could fade away upon taking the North-South gap in prices into account.
