Economic Development In Italy

The Economic development in Italy

The lack of coal as a primary energy source in Italy pushed the country to an industrialisation process totally different from the European pioneers of industrialisation. According to Toninelli (2010) the reliance on hydropower and later on on hydrocarbons was one of the main driver of the peculiar Italian economic development. As a consequence, the manufacturing firms were small energy efficient units, mainly located in the northern part of the country and they relied mostly on waterpower as energy resource. According to Toninelli (2010), Italy followed a dualistic model in its industrial development, that was characterised by few “modern productive units on the one hand and an excessive number of small

As a consequence, the Italian industrialisation model brought about the constitution of small low energy-consuming units, instead of big firms. This path was the result of the lack of coal and the reliance on traditional sources of energy first and then on the reliance on hydrocarbons.

Furthermore, Blim refers at industrialisation in Italy as a small scale process in which hundreds small specialised factories are interlinked with each other, a particular Italian phenomenon that reached its peak some decades after the World War

According to Malanima and Zamagni (2010), the drivers of Italian economic growth have always been difficult to sort out and were the centre of debates for many years. However, according to them “technical progress and the increase of useful knowledge have been the driving forces of modern growth since the beginning in the 1880s” (Malanima & Zamagni, 2010, p. 4), years in which they state that the second-revolution took place. In their paper they made a clear distinction between the economic growth brought about the technological innovation of the first industrial revolution, that is to say, the exploitation of iron, coal and the use of watermills. Whereas, they account the innovations related to electricity, chemicals and engineering as the fruit of the second industrial revolution (Malanima & Zamagni, 2010). As already stated in the introduction, according to Malanima, energy sources alone are not sufficient to foster industrialisation and economic growth, they have to be combined by technological innovations (Malanima