Political Underdevelopment and Economic Recession in Italy

Abstract

Analysis of the response of the state to the recurring economic crises of the 1970s must begin with the assumption that there has been a perceptible response by the state which can be investigated from a politico-economic perspective. But in the case of Italy the problem immediately arises that it is not clear in what sense we can talk of the state responding even in a superficially coherent short-term manner to successive crises (in particular, inflation 1974, exchange-rate crisis 1976, continual growth in unemployment since then). Such is the fragmentation of power at the elite level and such is the relative autonomy of the various institutions one from another that long-term government plans for recovery tend either to be blocked within the administration or to find themselves emptied of real content by party-political pressures, and short-term responses from a variety of governmental sources may conflict with one another: most obviously this has occurred in the incongruity between the tight monetary and credit policy exercised by the Bank of Italy in 1976–7 and the failure to control government spending in the same period. It has been observed in the past¹ that legislative and administrative activity in Italy apparently does little that is systematic to resolve the pressing structural problems in the Italian economy. Predieri² for instance has argued that much of the time of the Italian Parliament is taken up with legislation which concerns relatively small-scale or even trivial issues likely to be Of concern mainly to small groups of deputies or senators with particular regional or sectoral interests.