Of finance and trade: three essays on the Italian economic history

Globalization and international dynamics have always been crucial to understand modern economic development. Balance of payments dynamics, budget deficit, cur- rent account and international trade are the common subjects analyzed in order to deepen the issue from a macroeconomic perspective. The three chapters of the thesis cover exactly these topics. The first chapter provides new and robust estimates of the Italian current account between 1861 and 1914 overcoming the lacking data context showed by previous studies. In particular, focus is on the main entries of the invis- ible trade balance, that are: remittances, tourism, freights and capital interests. The second chapter shed lights on the relationship between budget deficit and current account deficit testing the so-called “twin deficit hypothesis” and exploiting part of the series of the first chapter together with other dataset. The econometric analysis is applied to both the short-run and the long-run. The third paper deepen the role of freights within the Italian international trade by looking to a new unit transport cost series presented for the first time in this kind of literature. The analysis is extended also to some specific determinants of trade such as bulkiness and distance.