Gaspari 2024 Fascist Italy vs. cost of living index numbers

1 The term austerity "rationality" rather than rationale, has been chosen to stress the relationship between austerity policies and standard economic rationality, an all-encompassing view that weds practical policies and economic theory. I have identified five main conceptual building blocks of austerity rationality: (1) idealization of the free market; (2) skepticism of the role of the state in economics (retrenchment of the State), in particular the refusal of its social and welfare function; (3) policy of fiscal and monetary rigor; (4) a moralizing rationale of self-sacrifice and the virtue of savings; (5) the need for a strong and technocratic government. For details, see Mattei (2016a).

Choice Reviews Online, 2016

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the complex sociocultural and ideological reasons that lay behind the well-known fall in the number of women workers in the Italian population censuses from the post-Unification period to Fascism. This was a time when the statisticians of the whole 'civilized' world were engaged in the definition of the modern statistical notion of 'active population'. Through an examination of material published by Italian as well as non-Italian statistical institutions and of the debates on women's work at the turn of the century, the article shows how the statisticians sought to make their data comparable to those of other, more modem countries and argues that an important turning point in the changing statistical representations of women's work in Italy occurred with the census of 1901. This coincided with growing interest in the question of women's work and the campaign for the introduction of legislation 'protecting' women workers. As state constructions, the censuses clearly contributed to the production of a more masculinized image of the labor force, an image which, however, eventually became too distant from reality even for the statisticians themselves.

Three dates mark events that have left a permanent imprint on relations between the private and public sectors in Italy: 1933, 1962, and 1993. The ftrst corresponds to the creation of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IR_I), a public holding company assigned the task of rehabilitating and managing the industrial enterprises that previously had been controlled by mixed banks, which themselves passed under state control. Under the banking law of 1936, these banks were no longer able to carx'y out medium- to long-term credit brokerage or hold significant shares of industrial enterprises. The second date, 1962, marks the nationalization of the electrical energy industry and the end of a long period of a type of private capitalism in Italy based on the enormous financial power of the large electrical energy goups. Finally, in 1993 the privat- ization of state-owned companies and, above all, of the major banks controlled by IRI (Banca Commerciale and Credito Italiano), tog...

Labour, 2008

A bargaining model is proposed and tested in order to explain the irrelevance of the general labour market conditions to wage settlements in the postwar Italian economy. The model is a "right to manage model", but the solution cannot be improved, being both on the labour demand curve and on the contract curve. The reason for such an outcome is that both rums and unions have priorities, and distinguish the labour force between insiders and outsiders. Different definitions of insiders are used, but in the postwar Italian economy the employees and ex-employees of the industrial sector appear to be the share of the labour force which have been better protected by both contractual parties.

H-Net Reviews, 2015

The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy since Unification, edited by Gianni Toniolo, is the result of a collective research on Italy's “modern economic growth” conducted by Italian and international scholars, as well as members of the research departments of the Bank of Italy, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the country's political unification. Based on the papers presented at the international conference “Italy and the World Economy, 1861-2011” hosted by the Bank of Italy in October 2011, the volume is composed of twenty-one chapters, most of which are coauthored by both Italian and non-Italian authors; a rich final bibliography; and some eighty-five pages of quantitative data on the Italian economy since 1861. As stressed by the editor (p. 4), such data are the fresh findings of recent quantitative research in a number of fields, and include new statistics on national accounts, productivity, and welfare indicators, as well as new measures of various economica...

Management & Organizational History, 2017

This article deals with the relationship between science and politics and in particular with the reciprocal legitimation process involving research schools and political regimes. It focuses on the case of Italian statistics during the early twentieth century. Its emergence as both an independent scientific field and a national research school, in fact, went together with the rise of nationalism and the establishment of the fascist regime. The paper uses the biography of Corrado Gini to analyze the process of mutual legitimization between science and politics under fascism. Gini's academic and professional careers show in fact how actors and ideas could compete through their ability to alter the status of the discipline, the technical functions it was assigned, and to attract funds in a changing political context. Gini, as an institutional entrepreneur, was able to make his research school hegemonic in Italy by leveraging the need for scientific legitimation of new state policies during World War I and under fascism. The reinterpretation he provided of his career after the end of World War II is crucial both to deconstructing this process and to shedding light on the postwar de-legitimation of Italian statistics.