Territorio e analisi statistico-economica

Abstract

A careful study of national income must necessarily address the issue of localization of economic activities in each country. This aspect has been a primary focus since the first scholars of quantitative economics - the Political Arithmeticians - in setting the background for measuring income, paid large emphasis on the localization of firms. With the evolution of research and knowledge on how income is generated, distributed and used, a larger and larger set of evidence has been produced on per-capita income differences across and within countries. The awareness of the degree of income variability within a country has fostered the investigations aimed at identifying what can be defined as the "areas for the study of the circular flow of income". As a consequence, the scholars of economic statistics happened to conduct their research in a field where scholars of other disciplines were already contributing: it is the case of labor economists and/or economic geographers. Hence, in the last part of this essay, we compare the different approaches to analyzing the economic characterization of the territory taken by: a) scholars of the circular flow of income, b) scholars of local labor markets and c) scholars of firms' localization.