Performance

Abstract

The changes in the Italian financial system whose causes and basic outcomes we have examined were structural and so mark an important advance. The old forms were incompatible with the new international trends. Above all, they corresponded to the modus operandi of a mixed economy undergoing a slow, contradictory but irreversible process of dissolution. But more advanced morphological arrangements, though positive per se, can operate with different degrees of efficiency and prove to be more or less functional to the economy. In our discussion these three levels — forms, efficiency and economic effects — are treated sequentially and separately. With this approach, our analysis can lay a better foundation for a concluding judgment and, if not predictions, at least some suggestions of the shape of things to come.