IV - Italy's Foreign Trade 1862-1950by Giovanni Federico, Sandra Natoli, Giuseppe Tattara and Michelangelo Vasta

The volume is devoted to the reconstruction of data on Italy's foreign trade from the country's Unification until 1950. Foreign trade has always been at the very heart of the debate on economic policy, especially due to its interconnections with growth. From its outset, the new State aimed at registering its trade interchange as accurately as possible. The official sources offer a massive volume of data, although difficult to access and use. The present research maximizes the sources' potentialities: homogeneous series have been reconstructed by means of the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), which has led to the new classification of over 6.000 categories of products, surveyed by the Italian Customs between 1862 and 1950. The volume also contains the long-run series of total trade and those referring to the major ten commercial partners, as well as import and export series of the most important categories of products. Highly disaggregated data are downloadable from the Bank of Italy's website. The Introduction of the volume analyses the first eighty years of Italy's foreign trade.