The Effects of Unification: Markets, Policy and Cyclical Convergence in Italy, 1861-1913

Abstract

This paper examines the convergence of regional business cycles in the decades that followed Italy's Unification. The aggregate construction series point to cyclical convergence, but a sectorlevel analysis traces this result to the decline in differentiated "regional-policy" shocks. The regional market cycles diverged, as the regions specialized in different sectors of production; market-cycle convergence is observed only within the "industrial triangle," the regions of which also developed different specializations. This suggests that the balance between growing interdependence and growing differentiation is not general, as the current literature presumes, but specialization-specific.