Italian Industrial Production, 1861-1913: A Statistical Reconstruction. A. Introduction

This paper is the first section of Italian Industrial Production, 1861 1913: A Statistical Reconstruction (in progress). It includes a reader's guide to the entire work, a presentation of the more widely useful historical sources, and a discussion of the methodology underlying the calculation of the output series, the unit value added estimates, and the production ("real value added") series. The methodological sections dwell in particular on the deficiencies of the standard methodology that informs the earlier estimates for Italy (and the world-wide corpus in general): the failure to understand that the "data" in the sources cannot be taken at face value, as they are constructs that reveal their actual content only if adequately deconstructed; the failure to understand that documented production cannot represent undocumented production, and that the latter must therefore be reconstructed in its own right; the failure to understand that value added corresponds at once to the value of the results of activity and to the value of activity itself, as the market values activity by its results; the failure to understand that "real value added" is measurement in a common unit of constant purchasing power, and not in disparate physical units.