Happy 150thAnniversary, Italy? Institutions and Economic Performance Since 1861
本文回顾意大利统一150年来的经济表现，指出1990年代以来经济增长缓慢、出口竞争力下降、科技投入不足等问题，适合研究制度与长期经济增长的学者参考。
The 150 th anniversary of Italian Unification, celebrated in 2011, took place in the middle of a dramatic economic and political crisis; during the year, the economic downturn that followed the international banking crash of 2008-09 almost led to the collapse of Italian public finances, and in November 2011 the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned after months of political instability.The 2011 events, however, were the culmination of a trend started at least two decades earlier. 2 Indeed, during the 1990s and 2000s the rate of growth of Italian GDP has been less than 1% (0.97) per year, half of the average (2.25%) of the four largest countries of the European Union (France, Germany, Spain and UK).If we consider the first eleven years of the new century, the situation appears even worse: Italy's rate of growth has been 0.4% per year, while Germany, France, UK, and Spain have grown at least almost three time faster: respectively 1.15%, 1.17%, 1.63%, and 1.98%. 3 Furthermore, the Italian economic decline was not confined to growth, and the same gloomy picture appears when looking at other areas of the economy, for example international trade.In 2007, Italy had a share of 4 per cent of the total of the world trade, almost 40 per cent less than 15 years earlier.Moreover, its export specialization is more and more oriented towards low-technology traditional goods in sectors with the slowest rates of growth in world markets. 4Italy has also shown a weak performance in science and technology, with scarce attention to technical education, limited capacity to invest in R&D activities and, as a consequence, very weak patenting activity mainly concentrated in those fields far away from the technological frontier.