of Roberto Petrini from Repubblica Affari & Finanza, March 14, 2011
"Do not spend a penny more than what comes in hand." This was the aspiration that the secular public finance of Superman 'Italy as an infant recited in public and in private.
They called
Quintino Sella and Minghetti Marco, exchanged the baton between 1861, when the first meeting of Parliament and the 1876 end date of the Government of the Right. Their goal was to those considered impossible: bring down the enormous debt that the infant had accumulated unitary state to finance the wars of the Risorgimento. How did they do? Administer public as if it was the 'family farm, did not spend a penny more than they could. Thrift and discipline were their words of 'order. One way of life that economic conception.
Quintino Sella, Biella hydraulic engineer, when he was already in politics, in 1863, was the first to reach the summit of Monte Viso, and in his spare time, he found a way to establish the CAI, the Italian Alpine Club. The title of an essay speaks volumes about his character: "Theory and practice of the slide rule." Not that he was a provincial spent a long period of study in Paris and did not neglect the 'Europe. As Marco Minghetti, on 16 March 1876 announced in Parliament on reaching a balanced budget was no less experience and stubbornness: he left Bologna to fight with the captain's 'War in the Piedmontese army' s independence, he found time to travel for the Old Continent, he studied biology, mineralogy, chemistry, botany and economy. It is said that reciting Dante everything by heart.
had to do the 'Italy and did it, even from an economic standpoint. They made the pound become the coin of the kingdom, created the General Accounting Office and the Court of Auditors. Together with the 'Italy was born July 10, 1861, the Great Book of debt, the curse of the Peninsula. Even then he was full of numbers in the column of the past and the loans were mainly delivered in dangerous foreign hands: the Hambro (1851), the Rothschilds (1857) in Blount (1866). A situation similar to Greece and Portugal today, to understand where each signature had slaves in international markets and our "income" regularly quoted on the Paris Stock Exchange. Sella and Minghetti, Tremonti as today, did not sleep soundly.
's only requirement of the two rocky ministers that Italy had just been created or saved, as an alternative to cash more.
Cut military spending, although it took ten years to finance the suppression of uprisings south. But above all, raise taxes and invented new ones: the 'Sella engineer devised a gimmick to calculate directly to' domestic mills 's assessment of' odious meal tax. It was introduced on the new model of mobile wealth income tax English is the first to rate Once the income earned by a person without the use of various clues and bizarre as the number of windows or the fireplace in the 'home of the taxpayer. It was reformed the taxation of financial income and agriculture. At the end of public expenditure in GDP fell from 16.7 percent in 1866 to 13 percent in 1868 and remained at this level for the 'entire following decade. Trifles compared to today's levels, but then it was a great success. The same applies to the tax burden: rose by 4 percentage points in 1871 to reach 10.8 per cent of GDP.
rigorous air of moral free-trade but the right one was immune from the vulgar anti-statism: eliminated duties until the point of damaging the 'weak and small southern industry accustomed to international comparison. But Sella and Minghetti, who had the obsession of good governance and improvements, the economy did not think at all that belonged only to rotagonisti private. Of course, the Right touched the liquidation of 'axis clergyman: he did it without too many scruples assigned to a ministerial Quintino Sella, although at first he wanted to even recourse to a pool of foreign banks. Empirical evidence shows, however, the public purse, was determinative: the Right railways built, using the formally private but financed thoroughly (so much so that today there 'who say that the budget is balanced, realized after expenses railway would be an accounting artifice). Eventually, between 1860 and 1865, were built 2,100 km of track.
Public works marked the first stirrings of that Italy: they built huge water works as the Channel Tunnel and the Cavour Fréjus, walked the Gotthard. John Maynard Keynes, theorist of 'public intervention in the economy, would be born only in 1883. However, by the Right was not enough to revive the 'Italy that came out exhausted. He touched the left, and Depretis Crispi, the task of making us take off: in 1887 he arrived, energetic, protective customs tariff (from 'steel wool, wheat), while marine and rail companies were abundantly favored by the affluent public procurement. On balance the average product per capita increased by 29 percent between 1861 and 1910 and much of the credit was the turning point of economic policy of the Left and on the end of the century, the so-called boom Giolittian security and insurance when they began to give citizenship and right to consume even the working masses.
A hundred years later, the 'Italy is once again at a turning point. The eighties of the twentieth century, with the political system and blocked the perennial coalitions of the First Republic, had developed and magnified corruption public debt. It was since 1992 that the governments of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, but also by Giuliano Amato and Lamberto Dini Romano Prodi had to pursue the path of discipline and be prepared to abandon the pound for the 'euro, the new common European currency. He was shot down public debt, reforming the pension indexation system, designed to introduce new taxes also affect the heritage.
care prepared by these heirs of 'austerity of the historical Right worked. But phase two and development policy, was never initiated el 'Italy continues to grow half of the other countries. Instead of Crispi and Giolitti Depretis in the first decade of this century, the rudder passed all'antistatalismo rebellious and liberal Berlusconi. The purse strings were tightened, the indiscriminate cuts. Development projects and industrial policy are not talking. L 'Italy celebrates its 150 years with the bleak prospect of economic decline. Because the penalty is not a later development.
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