Sakari Saaritsa is an economic and social historian working on topics related to development, poverty, welfare and human capital. His research interests include social inequality, private and public investments into health and education, intrahousehold resource allocation, historical indicators of well-being and human development, relationships between economic growth and human resources development, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral dialogue between development policy, development economics and development history, labour history, and relevant research methods and sources, such as microeconometrics, demographics, anthropometrics, household budgets and oral histories.

Sakari is currently working on the Academy of Finland research project "Counteracting Amnesia in Development: Studies from the Periphery", directed by Juhani Koponen (University of Helsinki).

Pasquale Scaramozzino is a Professor of Economics at SOAS, University of London, and at Università di Roma Tor Vergata. He received a BSc in Statistics and Economics from Università di Roma La Sapienza, and an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics and a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. He has taught at the University of Bristol and at University College London. His current research interests covers development economics, applied econometrics and finance.

Maria Edo is a PhD student at Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires. Her research interests cover topics related to welfare measurement, poverty analysis and social programs’ evaluation. She is currently focused on analyzing the course of argentine’s middle class over the last two decades. She has also participated in several World Bank projects connected with her research interests dealing with different countries around the world (Iraq, Argentina, Bolivia, etc). Maria is the first latin-american researcher to join HHB: bienvenida Maria!

Marta Fana is a PhD student in Economics at Institut d'Etudes Politiques, SciencesPo Paris. Her research interests cover topics related to political economy: currently, she is focused on the dynamics of income distribution and vulnerability analysis across social classes over the past four decades in Italy and France. She worked for several international institutions, as European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Asian Development Bnak and OECD, and consultancy projects related to public procurement and corruption.

Welcome on board, Marta!

During the Fascist period, the city of Rome underwent a period of great demographic expansion, that will lead quickly to more than a million of inhabitants. This population boom is due mainly by the arrival of an increasing number of immigrants from many parts of the country. These newcomers faced a housing market inflated by the continuous growth in demand. For this reason are born a series of spontaneous settlements.

In order to monitor the phenomenon, the Governatorato of the city organizes, from the second half of the 20s, a series of censuses. To that of 1933 it was possible to identify the individual survey forms within which abound information on family composition, the profession and the income of the individual components. Italian archives will continue to demonstrate the inexhaustible mines of family budgets.