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Author: Gianni Toniolo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-03-07
Total Pages: 802
ISBN-13: 0199936692
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification provides, for the first time, a comprehensive, quantitative "new economic history" of Italy.
Author: Gianni Toniolo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-01-04
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 0199936706
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Andrea Lorenzo Capussela
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-04-12
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 019251735X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Erik Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 801
ISBN-13: 0199669740
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: John Anthony Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 0198731280
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Short Oxford History of Italy series, in seven volumes, will offer a complete History of Italy from the early middle ages to the present and, in each period, will present the most recent historical perspectives on Italian history. This means setting Italian history in the broader contextof European history as a whole. It also means questioning accepted interpretations of Italian history in each of these periods and, in particular, the idea that Italy's history has been significantly different from that of the rest of Europe. Each volume will emphasise how developments in Italy ineach period are best understood as variants on broader European patterns of political, economic social and cultural change. This volume covers the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Nineteenth Century. Consisting of nine essays written by leading British and American historians, the volume shows how Italy's unexpected political unification and independence were inseparable from the impact of the broaderprocesses of modernisation that were changing the face of Europe and the fabric of European society. The social and political tensions that fuelled the struggles for independence were rooted in Italy's difficult modernisation, which continued thereafter to threaten the consolidation of the newItalian state. But Italy's difficult modernisation did not preclude real change, and although Italy entered the twentieth century as a highly imperfect democracy it was not noticeably more imperfect, illiberal or divided than its nineteenth century European counter-parts, nor did the new challengesposed by the rise of mass society make fascism an inevitable outcome of the Risorgimento. Italy in the Nineteenth Century provides both the general and specialist reader with a critical but concise introduction to the most recent historical debates and perspectives.
Author: Helmut Walser Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-29
Total Pages: 882
ISBN-13: 0191617458
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany'. Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.
Author: Vera Zamagni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 430
ISBN-13: 9780198292890
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Economic History of Italy 1860-1990 gives a scholarly and authoritative account of Italy's progress from a rural economy to an industrialized nation, covering in detail agriculture, trade, banking, public intervention, the standard of living, and education. It provides an interpretativeaccount of the economic history of Italy since unification and offers an extensive resource of quantitative data. Professor Zamagni argues that Italy only effectively became an industrialized nation after the Second World War, with the south still being clearly behind the rest of the country. Her argument makes use of both macroeconomic approaches, in looking at the growth of income, investment, consumption,trade, and the role of the state, and microeconomic approaches, drawing conclusions from the history of individual banks and corporations. Italy's movement from peripheral status in Europe to a central position as a prosperous country was achieved through a remarkable flexibility in adapting newtechnology and new institutions.
Author: Ronald Schaffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1994-04-28
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 0195364287
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →After such conflicts as World War II, Vietnam, and now the Persian Gulf, the First World War seems a distant, almost ancient event. It conjures up images of trenches, horse-drawn wagons, and old-fashioned wide-brimmed helmets--a conflict closer to the Civil War than to our own time. It hardly seems an American war at all, considering we fought for scarcely over a year in a primarily European struggle. But, as Ronald Schaffer recounts in this fascinating new book, the Great War wrought a dramatic revolution in America, wrenching a diverse, unregulated, nineteenth-century society into the modern age. Ranging from the Oval Office to corporate boardroom, from the farmyard to the battlefield, America in the Great War details a nation reshaped by the demands of total war. Schaffer shows how the Wilson Administration used persuasion, manipulation, direct control, and the cooperation of private industries and organizations to mobilize a freewheeling, individualist country. The result was a war-welfare state, imposing the federal government on almost every aspect of American life. He describes how it spread propaganda, enforced censorship, and stifled dissent. Political radicals, religious pacifists, German-Americans, even average people who voiced honest doubts about the war suffered arrest and imprisonment. The government extended its control over most of the nation's economic life through a series of new agencies--largely filled with managers from private business, who used their new positions to eliminate competition and secure other personal and corporate gains. Schaffer also details the efforts of scholars, scientists, workers, women, African- Americans, and of social, medical, and moral reformers, to use the war to advance their own agendas even as they contributed to the drive for victory. And not the least important is his account of how soldiers reacted to the reality of war--both at the front lines and at the rear--revealing what brought the doughboys to the battlefield, and how they went through not only horror and disillusionment but felt a fervent patriotism as well. Some of the upheavals Schaffer describes were fleeting--as seen in the thousands of women who had to leave their wartime jobs when the boys came home--but others meant permanent change and set precedents for such future programs as the New Deal. By showing how American life would never be the same again after the Armistice, America in the Great War lays a new foundation for understanding both the First World War and twentieth-century America.
Author: Carlo Bastasin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-08-31
Total Pages: 191
ISBN-13: 1009235354
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Kevin H. O'Rourke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 410
ISBN-13: 0198753640
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
