The Oxford Handbook Of The Italian Economy Since Unification

This Oxford Handbook provides a fresh overall view and interpretation of the modern economic growth of one of the largest European countries, whose economic history is less known internationally than that of other comparably large and successful economies. It will provide, for the first time, a comprehensive, quantitative "new economic history" of Italy. The handbook offers an interpretation of the main successes and failures of the Italian economy at a macro level, the research--conducted by a large international team of scholars --contains entirely new quantitative results and interpretations, spanning the entire 150-year period since the unification of Italy, on a large number of issues. By providing a comprehensive view of the successes and failures of Italian firms, workers, and policy makers in responding to the challenges of the international business cycle, the book crucially shapes relevant questions on the reasons for the current unsatisfactory response of the Italian economy to the ongoing "second globalization." Most chapters of the handbook are co-authored by both an Italian and a foreign scholar.

Italy is a country of recent decline and long-standing idiosyncratic traits. A rich society served by an advanced manufacturing economy, where the rule of law is weak and political accountability low, it has long been in downward spiral alimented by corruption and clientelism. From this spiral has emerged an equilibrium as consistent as it is inefficient, that raises serious obstacles to economic and democratic development. The Political Economy of Italy's Decline explains the causes of Italy's downward trajectory, and explains how the country can shift to a fairer and more efficient system. Analysing both political economic literature and the history of Italy from 1861 onwards, The Political Economy of Italy's Decline argues that the deeper roots of the decline lie in the political economy of growth. It places emphasis on the country's convergence to the productivity frontier and the evolution of its social order and institutions to illuminate the origins and evolution of the current constraints to growth, using institutional economics and Schumpeterian growth theory to support its findings. It analyses two alternative reactions to the insufficient provision of public goods: an opportunistic one – employing tax evasion, corruption, or clientelism as means to appropriate private goods –- and one based on enforcing political accountability. From the perspective of ordinary citizens and firms such social dilemmas can typically be modelled as coordination games, which have multiple equilibria. Self-interested rationality can thus lead to a spiral, in which several mutually reinforcing vicious circles lead society onto an inefficient equilibrium characterized by low political accountability and weak rule of law. The Political Economy of Italy's Decline follows the gradual setting in of this spiral as it identifys the deeper causes of Italy's decline.

The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics provides a comprehensive look at the political life of one of Europe's most exciting and turbulent democracies. Under the hegemonic influence of Christian Democracy in the early post-World War II decades, Italy went through a period of rapid growth and political transformation. In part this resulted in tumult and a crisis of governability; however, it also gave rise to innovation in the form of Eurocommunism and new forms of political accommodation. The great strength of Italy lay in its constitution; its great weakness lay in certain legacies of the past. Organized crime--popularly but not exclusively associated with the mafia--is one example. A self-contained and well entrenched 'caste' of political and economic elites is another. These weaknesses became apparent in the breakdown of political order in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This ushered in a combination of populist political mobilization and experimentation with electoral systems design, and the result has been more evolutionary than transformative. Italian politics today is different from what it was during the immediate post-World War II period, but it still shows many of the influences of the past.

Carlo Bastasin and Gianni Toniolo provide a much-needed, up-to-date economic history of Italy from unification in 1861 to the present day. They show how, thirty years after unification, Italy began a long phase of convergence with more advanced economies so that by the late twentieth century Italy's per capita income reached the levels of Germany, France and the UK. From the mid-1990s, however, the Italian economy declined first in relative and then absolute terms. The authors describe the intertwined financial and institutional crises that eroded trust in the political system and in the economy at the exact juncture when new technologies and markets transformed the global economy. Longstanding problems of uneven levels of education and obsolete bureaucratic and judicial practices deepened the division between economically vibrant regions and the rest, causing polarization, political instability and rising public debt. Italy's contemporary malaise makes the country a test-case for understanding the implications of protracted declines in productivity and the flattening of GDP growth for the stability of western democracies, resulting in populism, mistrust and political instability.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to north-western Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (or West) and a non-industrial, or even de-industrializing, South (or Rest). This nineteenth-century divergence, which had profound economic, military, and geopolitical implications, has been studied in great detail by many economists and historians. Today, this divergence between the West and the Rest is visibly unraveling, as economies in Asia, Latin America and even sub-Saharan Africa converge on the rich economies of Europe and North America. This phenomenon, which is set to define the twenty-first century, both economically and politically, has also been the subject of a considerable amount of research. Less appreciated, however, are the deep historical roots of this convergence process, and in particular of the spread of modern industry to the global periphery. This volume fills this gap by providing a systematic, comparative, historical account of the spread of modern manufacturing beyond its traditional heartland, to Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or what we call the poor periphery. It identifies the timing of this convergence, finding that this was fastest in the interwar and post-World War II years, not the more recent miracle growth years. It also identifies which driving forces were common to all periphery countries, and which were not.

This book is the first quantitative description of Europe’s economic development at a regional level over the entire twentieth century. Based on a new and comprehensive set of data, it brings together a group of leading economic historians in order to describe and analyze the development of European regions, both for nation states and for Europe as a whole. This provides a new transnational perspective on Europe’s quantitative development, offering for the first time a systematic long-run analysis of national policies independent from the use of national statistical units. The new transnational dimension of data allows for the analysis of national policies in a more thorough way than ever before. The book provides a comprehensive database at the level of modern NUTS 2 regions for the period 1900–2010 in 10-year intervals, and a panoramic view of economic development both below and above the national level. It will be of great interest to economic historians, economic geographers, development economists and those with an interest in economic growth.

Cycles, Growth and the Great Recession is a collection of papers that assess the nature and role of the business cycle in contemporary economies. These assessments are made in the context of the financial market instability that distinguishes the Great Recession from previous post-war slowdowns. Theorists and applied scholars in the fields of economics and mathematical economics discuss various approaches to understanding cycles and growth, and present mathematical and applied macro models to show how uncertainty shapes cycles by affecting the economic agent choice. Also included is an empirical section that investigates how the Great Recession affected households’ housing wealth, labour productivity and migration decisions. This book aims to: Propose a novel understanding of the business cycle by comparing the approaches of various scholars, starting from Hyman Minsky and Piero Ferri. Show that uncertainty is a main feature of the business cycle that affects decision-making and economic behaviour in general. Explain with mathematical models how the behaviour of economic agents can lead to cyclical paths for modern developed economies. Augment theory with empirical analysis of some central issues related to the Great Recession. This book comprises an original view of such widely discussed subjects as business cycles, uncertainty, economic growth and the Great Recession, constructed around theory, models and applications.

This book draws lessons on the importance of meritocracy for economic growth by analysing Italy's economic decline in the past few decades. Connections, rather than merit, are a long-standing feature of the Italian elites, even in the corporate sector. This became a significant problem when Italy's economy could no longer grow due to imitation, devaluation, and public debt, and faced the challenges of becoming a frontier knowledge-based open economy. This book uses international comparisons on social capital, governance, the role of the public sector, efficiency of the judiciary, education, gender and social inequality, social mobility, corporate standards, financial structures, and more to evaluate Italy's economic performance. It argues that the arrogance of mediocracy is more damaging than that of meritocracy. Italy experienced an economic miracle after the Second World War, and it is still an advanced economy and a member of the G7. Until the 1960s it seemed destined to catch up with the best-performing countries. Then the growth engine stopped, its debt skyrocketed, and Italy became a weaker member of the Eurozone. Many other countries in the world have heavy historical legacies and low social capital, and many others have to make the jump from imitation led growth to endogenous growth. The lessons drawn from studying Italy's case can therefore have important international applications.