Introduction

Future historians are likely to take the crumbling of the Berlin wall in 1989 as the date when the ‘postwar’ era ended in Europe. In Italy, however, ‘postwar’ history came to a clear end on 5 April 1992. At the general elections held on that day, a relatively modest if surprising shift of the electorate away from the traditional parties opened the way to a ‘quiet revolution’, which was still unfolding at the time that this book went to print. Its outcome is by no means sure except for one thing: Italian politics will never be the same again. And since, as we shall see, institutions and politics played not a minor role in shaping the economy, we may now safely look at the half-century that followed the fall of Fascism as a well-defined phase in the economic history of the country: the postwar years are definitely ripe for historical analysis.

Italy's performance relative to the world's more advanced large economies is summarized in Table 14.1. As the catching-up approach predicts, Italy is outperformed by a latecomer’, Japan. The prediction, however, is not clearly fulfilled in the case of such ‘early comers’ as Canada, Germany and France, all of which have growth rates that are not significantly different from Italy's over the whole fifty-year period. Over the postwar period (1950–89), Italy outperforms Canada and France, whereas the growth differential with Germany remains negligible.

Table 14.1 undoubtedly summarizes a success story, relative both to that of other countries and to Italy's own economic record in the previous three centuries.