The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification is an imposing collection of essays, whose title reveals the ambition to become a milestone in the quantitative economic history of Italy. To this end, leading economic historians and economists, from Italy and abroad, have been gathered and put to work with a large group of researchers from the central bank of Italy. The list of contributors features as many as forty-six authors, ten of which are prominent non-Italian scholars. This is, in and of itself, a remarkable achievement: for the first time, post-unification Italy has moved to the center of world scholarly debate. Much ado is warranted. In preindustrial times, Italy was one of the richest civilizations, but even in modern times the country has consistently ranked among the ten largest economies in the world. With good reason, therefore, the book starts out by presenting unified Italy as a success story, which rose from poverty and backwardness to prosperity and the economic core. It points out that unified Italy's rapid progress has not only been impressive, but also unexpected. Italy is an interesting case study for a number of other reasons: the stubborn persistence of its regional divide, unparalleled in Western Europe, as well as its cultural, social, and (not least) political peculiarities, which are and have been renowned throughout the world.

The book's structure book seems to support its ambitions. The first part, Aggregate Growth and Policy, begins with “An Overview of Italy's Economic Growth” (Gianni Toniolo), which conveys in a few pages the state-of-the-art economic history of post-unification Italy and the optimistic message of the book. The subsequent four chapters progressively familiarize the educated international reader with the subject at hand: the Italian economy is discussed within the world economy, from the first globalization (Harold James and Kevin O'Rourke) to the economic miracle and the second globalization (Nicholas Crafts and Marco Magnani); followed by a comparison with Germany and Japan (Andrea Boltho), and “The Italian Economy Seen from Abroad” (Marcello De Cecco), a bright and readable chapter summarizing how modern Italy has been interpreted by foreign scholars, from Adam Smith to Robert Putnam.

This is only the starter, however. The second part, Sources of Growth and Welfare, is the most substantial dish. The first half discusses new and up-to-date figures about Italy's national accounts (Alberto Baffigi), productivity (Stephen Broadberry, Claire Giordano, and Francesco Zollino) and living standards (Andrea Brandolini and Giovanni Vecchi). Most of these data—the comprehensive series of GDP (supply and uses, at constant and current prices), the balance of payments, the workforce, and the net capital stock—are presented in an extended statistical appendix at the end of the volume. This original work is a constituent part of the book, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. For the first time, Italy has a modern set of historical national accounts, which are fully verifiable and which stand up to international standards. Although this is not the last word on the subject, it is certain to become an indispensible reference upon which further improvements are possible. The second half of Part II deals with human capital (Giuseppe Bertola and Paolo Sestito), migrations (Matteo Gomellini and Cormac Ó Gráda), and democratization and civil capital (Luigi Guiso and Paolo Pinotti), this last chapter being probably the least satisfactory in terms of historical accuracy.

Parts III and IV deal respectively with International Competitiveness, partly based upon the new series previously discussed, and Firms, Banks, and the State, which deals primarily with institutions. The first chapters follow a cliometric approach, dealing either with comparative advantage (Giovanni Federico and Nikolaus Wolf), exchange rates (Virginia Di Nino, Barry Eichengreen, and Massimo Sbracia), or quite ingeniously with innovation and foreign technology (Federico Barbiellini Amidei, John Cantwell, and Anna Spadavecchia). Then come the chapters which have a natural focus on business history, but still pay attention to quantitative reconstructions: the last chapter of part three deals with multinational firms (Fabrizio Onida, Giuseppe Berta, and Mario Perugini), and a chapter on firm size and entrepreneurship (Franco Amatori, Matteo Bugamelli, and Andrea Colli) opens Part IV. The subsequent chapter, which addresses the banking system (Stefano Battilossi, Alfredo Gigliobianco, and Giuseppe Marinelli), is one of the most impressive: it manages to brilliantly merge both macro and micro perspectives with good econometrics and historical mastery— in one word, amazing. The last two chapters of Part IV deal with the burden of public debt (Fabrizio Balassone, Maura Francese, and Angelo Pace) and with the Italian administrative system (Magda Bianco and Giulio Napolitano), which is seen as “a source of competitive disadvantage” (p. 533). Part V is about The Regional Divide: after a chapter presenting long-term regional patterns (Giovanni Iuzzolino, Guido Pellegrini, and Gianfranco Viesti), an interpretation based on the new economic geography is put forward (Brian A'Hearn and Anthony Venables).

Having acknowledged that such a huge effort deserves high praise, it is fair to say that there is also room for criticism. At times, the volume falls well short of what one would expect from a “handbook.” This is because some chapters appear to be conceived mainly as articles for specialized journals, with a clear-cut position disregarding alternative approaches and relevant strands of the literature. In the chapter on civic capital, economics have been pushed too far at the expense of history. Among other things, I have found problematic—to say the least—the final figure of the chapter (p. 319; plus the related table at p. 320), which plots the share of votes for socialist and communist parties from 1861 (!) to 1921: the socialist party was founded in 1893 and the communist party as late as 1921. The authors do not explain what they are plotting in the first half of the graph. In other chapters, on the contrary, one may complain about the lack of definitive conclusions and of more investigative effort. For instance, when coming to the long-awaited part on the Italian regional divide, I discovered (p. 597) that apparently we still do not know whether there was a North-South gap in GDP at the time of unification, since the authors prefer not to take a position on alternative estimates (a diehard habit of the Italian academy). Finally, having digested the book, one is left with the sugary flavour that the message was too optimistic. Italy as a success story lasted until the early 1990s, but since then the country has been the worst performer in the advanced world in terms of GDP and has even fallen back in some social indicators. The recent economic decline, although discussed here and there (by Boltho, by Crafts and Magnani), deserved more attention: 150 years after unification, such a dismal finale should also be of interest to the international reader, not to mention the Italian one.