Abstract
Shipbuilding in post-Unification Italy is here documented by new national and regional time series. Where the extant national series point to secular decline, the new estimates reveal a major increase in output tied primarily to the growth of repair work on the one hand and of naval construction on the other. The regional estimates, which have no precedent in the literature, point to considerable concentration: Liguria accounted for more than half the product, and Campania for almost another quarter. Again, while in most regions shipbuilding was barely significant, in Liguria it represented up to a quarter of total industrial production. The further disaggregation of naval construction points to significant exports, from the 1890s, by the private yards in Tuscany and Liguria; the consensus view that Italy's engineering industry was then too backward to export at all is clearly unfounded.
Highlights
National productionThe new national estimates of 1911-price value added in ship construction and maintenance are summarized below in Appendix Table A
Abstract: »Schiffsbau in Italien, 1861-1913: die Last des Beweises«
The new national series confirm that shipbuilding went very much its own way, with production movements driven first by the market for traditional merchant sailing-ships, by naval construction, by the subsidies for merchant steamers, and in the run-up to the War, by the arms race
Summary
The new national estimates of 1911-price value added in ship construction and maintenance are summarized below in Appendix Table A. 1 and 2 refer to the new construction of merchant and naval vessels, respectively; both are simple sums of the physical series (in register or displacement tons) transcribed in Appendix Table B, with the 1911-price value added weights transcribed therein.. The budget data were used only to derive the 1911-price total; the corresponding “real” index is instead obtained by tracking the service lives of each of the 559 ships reported to have served in the Navy between 1861 and 1913, aggregating their displacements with typespecific weights (to exclude low-maintenance components like the armor, if any, and the cargo of bulk carriers), and trimming the resulting total to exclude the ships that were very new or very close to being retired. 5; another is the Istat “ships launched” series, which refers only to merchant ships; and the third is the present component
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