Aristocracy and Inequality in Italy, 1861-1931

Giovanni Vecchi, U. of Rome "Tor Vergata"
Brian A'Hearn, University of Oxford
Stefano Chianese, U. of Rome "Tor Vergata"

Measuring the evolution of inequality and absolute poverty over the long run is a task fraught with difficulties, mostly related to the availability of reliable data. For Italy, estimates of the distribution of income are available from 1861 to the present day. But the collection of household budgets on which they are based, though large and diverse, lacks rich families. The shape of the upper tail is implicit in parameters estimated using data covering roughly quintiles I-IV of the distribution. In this paper we explore the consequences for inequality estimates. Our contribution is twofold. First, we explore noble family archives as a source, and build a small-scale database based on the family account books of princes, dukes, marquises, and other aristocrats, covering the years 1861-1931. Second, we implement a method to combine these data with the existing database of Italian household budgets. Employing the same techniques as for previous estimates, we find that including direct observations from the upper tail increases income inequality measures by (at least) 25-30 percent – or, equivalently, 10-15 Gini points. In contrast, poverty estimates are more robust to the change in the data. We conclude by suggesting that historical family archives that include ledgers kept by the ‘maestro di casa’, are a relatively abundant and accessible source, which can be used systematically – not just in Italy – to improve estimates of the income distribution. This amounts to using real, genuine data to identify the dynamics of the share accruing to the élite, rather than relying on an assumed Pareto-distribution based interpolations or other statistical wizardries.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 75. Household Budgets: A history of living standards