Sovereignty, civic capital, and local development. A historical perspective in economic geography

In an article published in the Journal of Economic Geography, Giulio Cainelli and Roberto Ganau (DSEA, University of Padua), Mattia Balestra and Roberto Pierdicca (Università Politecnica delle Marche), Nadiia Matsiuk (FBK-IRVAPP – Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies), and Mario Pasquato (INAF) combine insights from history and economic geography to shed light on the long-run determinants of territorial development disparities in Italy.

Specifically, the authors investigate the effects of historical sovereignty changes on contemporary local economic development. They measure historical sovereignty change as the annual number of changes in political sovereignty occurring between 1000 and 1861, the year of Italian unification, and examine its impact on labor productivity in 2018.

Their findings reveal a negative relationship between historical sovereignty change and current local economic development. The study further identifies civic capital—both theoretically and empirically—as a plausible mechanism underlying this effect.

Click here to read the full paper

Click here to read the ANSA article