Abstract
This article seeks to provide a contribution to the literature on the evolution of manufacturing specialization by analyzing Italian regional production over the period 1951-2011. To this end, we start from the previous paper conducted by Cainelli and Stampini (2002; 2015) to create a dataset by making the most of seven different census data records on the Italian Industry released periodically by the National Statistics Institute (ISTAT) and compare data on the number of employees for 15 manufacturing sectors. Our analysis shows that regional specialization persists over time particularly in the Italian central area and in some regions of the North and South of Italy, while diversification and dispersion are observed in the rest of Italy