ABSTRACT
Between the revolutions of 1848-9 and the Peace of Versailles the Italian economy underwent most of the transformations that typically characterize the first phases of modern economic growth. In discussing the economic history of Italy one has to bear in mind that national unity and liberal democracy were new and fragile when modern economic growth took its first steps in the Italian peninsula. Kuznets uses the term modern economic growth to describe the current epoch of spreading application of science to processes of production and social organization and empirically identifies such growth with sustained high rates of increase in per capita product. All the current talk of a service economy rapidly replacing the industrial economy which generated and supported modern economic growth in the Western world during the last two hundred years. Commercial services performed more or less proportionally to gross domestic product while all other services rose more slowly than the latter.
