N90 - Regional and Urban History: GeneralReturn

The convergence of economic level across regions is nowadays discussed especially in association with the efficiency of the EU Cohesion policy. This is the reason why many researchers investigate economic convergence only in a short term, during the last few decades. It is also caused by the lack of historical statistical data for regional levels. We solved this problem atypically by using reconstructed historical regional data that allow us to investigate the convergence in a long term. In this paper, we focus on Beta-convergence of Italian regions using real per capita GDP. The time series consists of reconstructed historical regional data for the period 1891–2009 and regional data from ISTAT for the period 1995–2016. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the process of Beta-convergence across Italian regions in the period 1891–2016 through spatial econometric analysis considering different political background. We used cross-sectional analysis which was extended by the spatial lag model through spatial weights matrix. The whole period was divided into shorter time spans according to the important milestones in the Italian history. We found out that there were times of regional convergence, divergence and stagnation. There are two most remarkable periods: the divergence era which started at the beginning of WWI and continued through interwar period until the end of WWII and the convergence era during miracolo economico italiano in the 1950s and 1960s.