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Local labor systems and agricultural activities: the case of Tuscany.

Article Excerpt
Abstract The features of the Italian economy cannot be properly understood without taking into account the territorial organization, in particular, the so called local productive systems. The Italian National Statistical Institute provides a partition of the Italian territory into Local Labor Systems (LLS) on the basis of the Population Census data. LLS are a set of contiguous municipalities with a high degree of self-containment of daily commuter travel. This paper focuses on a study of the structural characteristics of agriculture activities in the LLS of Tuscany on the basis of the micro-data from the last General Agricultural Census. The main aim is to provide a picture of the economic activities of the LLS by using data from the Population and the Industrial censuses also.

Keywords Local labor systems * Agriculture * Censuses

JEL Classifications 050 * R10

Introduction

After the release of the recent census data on industry and services, several studies have been carried out to analyze the structural characteristics of the Italian economy, by focusing on the many different local systems that make up the mosaic of the country. In fact, the features of the Italian economy cannot be properly understood without taking into account the territorial organization of the economic activities: i.e. the local production systems (LPS) and, especially, of those manufacturing local systems characterized by many specialized small and medium sized enterprises (SME) that conform to the industrial district (ID) model (Becattini 1996).

The empirical research on local development is generally based on the so called local labor system (LLS) units, provided by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) from Population Census data (ISTAT and Sforzi 1997). Specifically, LLS are sets of contiguous municipalities with a high degree of self-containment of daily commuter travel. These territorial areas can be considered the empirical counterpart of the theoretical LPS.

The aim of this paper is to give a picture of the structural economic characteristics of the Tuscan LLS, by using data derived from Population Census (PC) (ISTAT 2001b), Economic Census (EC) on Industry and Service Activities (ISTAT 2001a), and Agriculture (AC) (ISTAT 2000). In particular, the attention is focused on the agricultural activities with the intent to complete the analysis of LLS carried out in the paper by Dei and Grassini ("Italy's Industrial Changes in the 1990s: The Case of Tuscany," presented at the 2005 IAES Conference, New York) that analyzed manufacturing sectors.

Since the LLS are defined and determined to explain the industrial features of the economy, we first will identify, through a cluster analysis, the economic specializations of the Tuscan LLS on the basis of the data on employment, and then we will provide a picture of the characteristics of agriculture. The analysis is enriched by a first processing of the georeferred data on land use and cover, which is provided by the European Project "Corine Land Cover 2000" (European Environment Agency 2000).

The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section the methodology and the data used are introduced and described. The third section shows the results of the cluster analysis on employment data to identify the features of the Tuscan LLS and describes the main characteristics of agricultural activities in the obtained groups. Final remarks are contained in the last section.

Theoretical Assumptions, Methodology and Data Used

The concepts of LPS and ID are widely used to describe and analyze the economic development of Italy. According to this approach, the Italian economy must be considered as a system of local economic (or productive) systems. The ID is a special case of a local productive system. From a theoretical point of view, it is "a socio-territorial entity which is characterized by the active presence of both a community of people and a population of firms in one local) area. In the district community and firms tend to merge" (Becattini 1990, p. 38).

In particular, the post-war economic development of some areas of Italy (Northern-east, Central Italy) and especially of Tuscany is characterized by the development of ID through the progressive localization over the agricultural areas of a large number of small firms (the average number of workers per establishments in Italy is 8.3 in 2001) specialized in durable and semi-durable consumption goods like furniture, leather, shoes, clothing, and textiles. Therefore, the non-urban territory has been characterized by the progressive localization of industrial and service activities over sowable land, with a parallel decline in the agricultural use (Romagnoli 1999).

The concept of LPS is territorially based and, therefore, even if it was introduced to explain the industrial development of Italy, it could be a suitable unit (instead of county or the single farm) to analyze the agricultural activities (Basile and Cecchi...