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One can sum up the results in seven stylized facts: heavy industries have grown more than manufacturing as a whole; the capital per worker has increased a great deal, but has left behind a sub-stantial number of small non-mechanized workshops; the average size of productive units has declined; employment has concentrated in small and medium-size units, while both the very small (below 10 employees) and the very large units (beyond 500) have decreased; during the economic miracle the number of hours worked increased and seasonality decreased; the stock of human capital seems to have increased; industry has been traditionally located in the North-West and is still quite concentrated in spite of the development of the Centre and the North-East; last but not least, most of the listed changes can be attributed mainly to within-sector changes, while structural change has had a minor role, at least apparently. None of these facts are really unexpected. However, there are some important differences from the norm - i.e. the pattern of industrialization of advanced countries in the 19th century. It is possible to interpret these differences as a creative adaptation to factor endowment (the scarcity of capital and coal) or as serious evidence of backwardness. The choice of one of these interpretations is still an open issue, which will need further research.

The dynamic of size distribution highlights three very interesting statistical inter-industrial regularities. Firstly, the dynamic distribution of the major firms shows a convergence towards the bottom of the size distribution, i.e. these firms grow but, the absolute size does not grow much because the firms that reach the highest stages recede. In fact, the entire universe of firms shows an extended series of leaping frogs , namely of firms that in the different phases, move many positions forward in the ranking of size classes, but also jump backwards, i.e. they do not remain stable. Secondly, the analysis of survival, carried out phase by phase for the entire universe of firms with regard to life-cycle and technological regime, presents a few interesting regularities. The first is the major rate of mortality, in general, of small firms, which is higher in mature sectors and in the high tech ones. The major firms also encounter greater risks in high-tech sectors, like, for example, Olivetti, while they have a greater life expectancy in the mature low-tech sectors. A third interesting characteristic is the fact that, in the Italian system of firms, there are no small and medium size firms in mature, high-tech sectors, and therefore the niche firm described in recent literature is missing. This permits us to exclude the possibility that the phenomenon has deep historical roots and to affirm that it is rather a result of one of the surprises of the 1970s.