Traps and Surprises in Long Time Series. Considerations on Italian Living Standards after Unification

Using Italian time series since 1861, we explore the evolution of living standards of Italian population after the Unification. Furthermore, we investigate the informative capacity of the aforementioned series to discover suitable long-run relationships among the variables to be used for a further modelling. Notwithstanding, the dynamics and the statistical characteristics of series have dramatically changed – both within each time series and among all ones – some interesting results have been drawn on the evolution of Italian living standards.