Abstract
Italy was created in 1861 through military annexation by the Kingdom of Savoy (with capital city Torino in Piedmont) of other Italian territories. Immediately thereafter, the new national government started to extend Piedmontese laws to the new nation’s southern regions, introducing conscription and heavy taxation. The institutions and body politics of the pre-unification Italian states differed considerably. The new state centralized governmental power to level those differences. The southern people, were subjected to heavy-handed coercion, if not exploitation. The paper focuses on the coercion imposed by fiscal policies on the South. It asks whether coercion from the center was attenuated by redistribution operated at the regional and, especially, at the personal level with a focus on the poor. The answers confirm that fiscal coercion was indeed formidable. The Italian state imposed a heavy tax burden on the poor of all regions. When public expenditure also is brought in the picture, the poor in the southern regions remained disadvantaged, but less than they were before unification.
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Notes
The economic differences between North and South at the time of unification are the subject of major debate. According to Felice (2016), the gap in per capita income emerging from reading the best literature should be between 5 and 15%. The GDP figures reported in Table 1 show a gap of 30%. The discrepancy is explained by the fact that, in 1861, economic activities were still disrupted by the war of 1860 and by political events.
After assisting in 1850, in Naples, at the trial of a liberal politician, Carlo Poerio, who received a prison sentence of 24 years imprisonment, Gladstone, the English liberal politician, wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Peel’s former foreign secretary), “This [the Bourbons] is the negation of Good erected into a system of government” (Magnus 1954, p. 99).
Not in terms of sheer size, but of organization and armament. The Piedmontese army had waged war against Austria in 1848 and 1859 and was sustained by a greater tax capacity, while the army of the Bourbons showed weakness even when confronted with popular revolts.
Readers interested to an up to date accurate analysis of the concept of coercion from a distinct social sciences approach will greatly benefit from reading the collective volume edited by Martinez-Vazquez and Winer (2014).
Law n° 2248 of March 20 1865.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies introduced a similar discipline in the 1830s (Gargano 2012).
Reported by Cappelli (2016).
The name was given by historians to distinguish it from the rightwing parties and movements of the Twentieth century.
Marongiu (2010) provides a detailed recounting.
Speech to the Chamber of Deputies by Ruggero Bonghi, June 29, 1861. Quoted by Parravicini (1958, p.14). Original source: A.P. Camera dei Deputati. Leg. VIII. Sess. I Discussioni, p. 894.
In the first election of 1861, voters represented 1.92% of the population (Istat 1878, p. 147).
As for the Historical Right, historians to distinguish that reformist coalition from the leftwing groups of the Twentieth century, created the name of Historical Left.
The numbers for taxes and GDP used for the graph are reported in Table 11.
(At least) three ways are possible for determining the fiscal residuum. The first one is called in the literature the administration or cash-flow approach. The second one, called in the literature the monetary income support approach, looks at the income-generating impact of revenue and expenditure and their balance. The third one, called in the literature the welfare or real income approach, looks more closely at the impact of central government policies on the welfare of the residents of various regions.
Ministero di agricoltura. industria e commercio (1882).
More specifically, they are: the very accurate budget of a Tuscan sharecropper recorded for 1878–1879 by Assirelli (1896); the four illustrative budgets referred to families of sharecroppers in Romagna sampled by Pasolini (1890, 1892). Santangelo Spoto (1891) provides the accurate budget of a proprietor family of Puglia in 1879. Einaudi (1898) calculates the incidence of local taxes on the budgets of a small sample of industrial workers in Torino a few years later. Finally, Mira (1970) provides an accurate account of the incidence of income and wealth taxes on the earnings of a notary of Pavia for the period stretching from 1867 to 1900.
The benefits of expenditure are assumed to be the same in Sicily as in the whole of the South, but taxes are different, as we saw.
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Acknowledgments
The author is very grateful for the editorial support received by this Journal and for the comments and suggestions made by two anonymous referees, by Silvia Fedeli, Juan Pablo Jimenez, Pier Vincenzo Bondonio and by the participants in the Workshop on Macroeconomics, Rationality and Institutions held in Rome on December 14–15, 2017.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Tables 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.
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Brosio, G. Coercion and equity with centralization of government: how the unification of Italy impacted the southern regions. Public Choice 177, 235–264 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0589-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0589-2