The fifth LHsem has taken place today. In the first session Anna Missiaia (University of Gothenburg) presented a work co-authored with (Dario Pellegrino, Matteo Gomellini,) entitled ‘From Global to local: the impact of trade shocks on Italian provinces during the first globalization’ (discussant Andrea Incerpi).

This paper examines the economic impact of the First Globalization on local economies in the case of nineteenth century Italy by combining data on foreign trade at the sectoral level, census data on manufacturing provincial employment, and new estimates of agricultural employment by crop at the provincial level. Crossing this information, the authors compute two local trade exposure measures, namely import penetration and export ratio, according to the sectoral specialization of each province. A panel analysis is made to test whether trade openness had an impact on the GDP growth of provinces. Preliminary results suggest that between 1871 and 1911, trade exposure was positively associated to growth in Northern provinces, but negatively associated to growth in the South. This different effect of trade suggests that trade could be a factor widening the notorious North-South gap. Further research will be necessary to identify the reasons for this different impact.

In the second session Pau Insa-Sánchez (University of Valencia) presented his new work ‘Inequality of opportunity in access to secondary education in 19th century Spain’ exploring access to secondary education in 19th-century Spain (discussant Pablo Martinelli Lasheras). The paper proposes secondary education graduation age as an effective way of measuring the implicit cost of acquiring education in historical contexts. Using a novel historical source on the Spanish high school network for academic year 1877-1878, it is shown that students from small, isolated municipalities bore increasingly larger costs than those from urban areas. Specifically, the size of the municipality of origin exerts a larger negative effect on those students bearing more costs to study. Such results suggest that a phenomenon of spatial isolation from knowledge, as well as a small and concentrated secondary education school network, created a problem of access to education and, thus, prevented an adequate transition to secondary mass schooling in the 19th century.