Michelangelo Vasta

The Structure of Italian Capitalism, 1952 1972: New Evidence Using the Interlocking Directorates Technique

The paper explores the structure of Italian capitalistic system by focusing on the relationships between financial banks, insurances and holdings- and industrial firms in Italy during the period 1952-72 through the analysis of the interlocks that existed between them. By an interlock is meant the link created between two firms when an individual belongs to the board of directors of both. The analysis is based on a database -Imita.db- containing data on over 300,000 directors of Italian joint stock companies for the years 1952, 1960 and 1972. After showing a descriptive statistics of the firms and the directors included in the database, the paper develops a network connectivity analysis of the system. This is integrated by a prosopographic study about the big linkers, defined as those directors cumulating the highest number of offices in each benchmark year. The paper confirms that Italian capitalism maintained substantial peculiarities in the period investigated. In particular, it argues that interlocks played an important role in guaranteeing the stability of the positions of control of the major private firms and their connections with State owned firms. In 1952 and 1960, the system, centred on the larger electrical companies, showed the highest degree of cohesiveness. That centre dissolved after nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1962 and was replaced by a less strong and cohesive one, hinged on banks, insurances and the major finance companies.

Italian export capacity in the long-term perspective (1861–2009): a tortuous path to stay in place

Abstract The paper focuses on the evolution of the capacity of Italian goods to reach international markets from the time of unification (1861) up to the present day (2009). It presents a wide range of new data series that present both the general trends of macroeconomic data related to the evolution of Italian foreign trade focusing, in particular, on the characteristics of export flows. The paper illustrates Italys tortuous path to maintain its position among the most advanced countries despite its peculiar specializations.

Evolution of Italian Enterprises in the 20th Century

The historiography.- Industrial structure (1911-2001).- The concentration of the industrial structure (1913-1971).- The demography of manufacturing firms (1911-1971).- The largest 200 manufacturing firms (1913-2001).- Ownership and control in Italian capitalism (1911-1972).- Firm performance (1900-1971).- Business strategies from Unification up to the 1970s.- Entrepreneurs and managers (1913-1972).

Opening the black box of entrepreneurship: The Italian case in a historical perspective

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the second industrial revolution and the end of the twentieth century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an empirically based taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs not exclusively founded on intuitions and qualitative judgements, the article provide valuable interpretative elements; second, the article puts forward some hypotheses about the relationship between entrepreneurship and Italian economic growth. In particular a cluster analysis singles out five different entrepreneurial typologies characterised by a widespread tendency to search for new markets, yet a scarce attitude towards innovation. Further it is suggested that the evolution of the institutional context slowed down the development of the entrepreneurial abilities and virtues necessary to grow.

Companies' insolvency and ‘the nature of the firm’ in Italy, 1920s–70s1

This article analyses the functioning of Italian insolvency laws and practices, in particular their role in the selection and relaunch of viable firms. The article investigates the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, and focuses on joint-stock companies. Using comparative data on the number of cases, we show that in Italy firms mainly used the procedure called fallimento (bankruptcy), consisting of the collection and subsequent liquidation of assets. Other procedures, such as deals with creditors or forms of receivership, able to give companies a further chance, were rarely used. On the basis of archival documents we maintain that this result was due to the strictness and complication of Italian procedures, as well as to their inability to select viable companies. The article also investigates the relation between the features of insolvency law and the nature of the Italian industrial system, specifically the peculiar small size and rapid turnover of joint-stock companies. We suggest that the pro-liquidation character of the insolvency law might have been one of the causes of the peculiarity of Italian industrial capitalism, even if the opposite direction of causality cannot be excluded.

What Do We Really Know About Protection Before the Great Depression: Evidence from Italy

The impact of protection on economic growth is one of the traditional issues in economic history, which has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection with the ratio of custom revenues to imports, which is bound to bias results if imports are not perfectly inelastic. In this paper, we show that the measure of protection matters, by estimating the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) by Anderson and Neary (2005) for Italy from its unification to the Great Depression. We put forward a different interpretation of some key moments of Italian trade policy and we show that the aggregate welfare losses were small in the long run and mostly related to the outlandish protection on sugar in the 1880s and 1890s. We also show that different measures of protection affect considerably the results of econometric tests on the causal relation between trade policy on economic growth in Italy and in the United States. Accordingly, we argue that the economic history of trade policy needs a systematic re-estimating of protection.

Large and entangled: Italian business groups in the long run

This article, by using both a qualitative and quantitative approach, focuses on large business groups (BGs) in Italy. It provides a methodology of analysis which aims at re-constructing the boundaries and the relevance of BGs in a national economy in the long-run, identifying a country-specific taxonomy of both their forms and the rationales (logics) for their existence. By adopting an original methodology, that is the network analysis, and by using a large and comprehensive dataset (Imita.db), this article also provides some proxy measures of the relevance of the largest BGs in the Italian economy, something which has never been done before in Italian business history research. The analysis clearly shows the persistence of large and entangled BGs in the Italian economy. It confirms that this particular form of business organisation is neither limited to the less developed countries, nor is simply a second best functional substitute of the multi-divisional form diffused in the liberal market economies. Finally, this article also suggests a research itinerary which can also be fruitfully applied in business history to other specific cases.

The only way to grow? Italian Business groups in historical perspective

ABSTRACT This article analyses the dynamics of business groups (BG) formation and diffusion in Italy in the twentieth century. It shows that BGs is not an organisational form which characterizes only developing countries or economies in their very early stage of development. Indeed, in its evolution from a peripheral country to one of the most advanced economies, Italy has been constantly populated by BGs. One striking feature of the Italian corporate system is that BGs are present not only among large firms, but also in almost all the other forms of enterprise: cooperative firms, municipalised companies, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and fast-growing medium-sized firms. Thus, BG seems to be the ‘only way to grow’ for Italian firms or, at least, the easiest way to reach a reasonable size. BG as a governance system looks particularly flexible, adapting itself to different ownership, market conditions and local contexts. In absence of obstacles of legal or fiscal nature, this flexibility is probably the main reason for its resilience.

Independent invention in Italy during the Liberal age, 1861-1913

This article examines the phenomenon of independent invention in Italy during the Liberal Age (1861–1913). It makes use of a new dataset comprising all patents granted in Italy in five benchmark years: 1864–5, 1881, 1891, 1902, and 1911. The following exercises are carried out. First, an examination is undertaken of the shares of independent, corporate, and foreign inventions and their evolution over time and across industries. Second, by exploiting the peculiarities of Italian patent legislation, which was characterized by relatively cheap fees and a flexible renewal scheme, the relative quality of independent and corporate patents is assessed. The results indicate that in Italy independent inventors made an important contribution to technological change in terms of number of patents, but the quality of their patents was significantly lower than that of firms and of foreign patentees.

Introduction: forms of enterprise in 20th century Italy

One important issue which has recently captured the attention and the research eff orts of both economists and economic historians has been the debate about the diff erent forms of capitalism in the world today. The ‘variety of capitalism’ debate has involved scholars of diff erent fi elds, from fi nance to management, from corporate governance to industrial economics (La Porta et al. 1999; Whitley 1999; Whittington & Mayer 2000; Hall & Soskice 2001; Morck 2005; Baumol, Litan & Schramm 2007). It is not easy to establish the starting point of this debate, which undoubtedly goes back to the explanation of the diff erent paths of economic development (Gerschenkron 1962). The focus of the analysis was, from this perspective, mainly comparative. It tried to identify, by adopting a macroeconomic approach, the national – basically institutional – determinants of the different paths of growth. Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly), when the comparison involved the advanced (Western) countries, the explanation of the diff erent levels of development was linked to the internal structure of the country’s capitalist institutions, which regulated the economic system. Not surprisingly, this has recently become the favourite topic of those economic historians interested in the issue of the ‘great divergence’ between Europe and its Western off spring on the one hand, and India and China on the other (Pomeranz 2000; Maddison 2007). In this very last case, it is clear that the origins of this divergence are basically to be found in the affi rmation of a capitalist culture which was established well before the First Industrial Revolution (Landes 1998; Acemoglu et al. 2005). Then, taking the Western lead for granted, the rise – and the fall – of the European champions has been seen as a neverending competition about more and more effi cient sets of institutions which regulate, enforce and strengthen national models of capitalism (North 1990; 2005). By identifying technical change as a key factor in the process of economic growth, another interpretation, following a Schumpeterian approach, provides a