This paper presents a reconstruction of the data on Italy's balance of payments and international investment position between the immediate post-war period and 1969. The reconstruction, consistent with the new standards set forth in the sixth edition of the International Monetary Fund's Balance of Payments Manual, extends previous research that covered the period between 1970 and the second half of the 1990s.
In the reconstruction, the current account balance remains substantially unchanged compared with the historical data, while for the financial account the changes are significant and due primarily to the use of previously unavailable information. Overall, statistical discrepancies between real and financial flows (errors and omissions) are now more consistently concentrated in the 1960s, when the illicit transfer of capital abroad was intense, a phenomenon that induces negative errors and omissions.
