A brief, up-to-date account of Italy's transformation from an agrarian state to an industrial powerhouse.

This textbook examines corruption through a macroeconomic lens, exploring the relationship between corruption, fiscal policy, and political economy. The book merges macroeconomic growth models with elements of political economic theory to address important applied topics such as income inequality within and across countries, growth slowdowns, and fiscal crises. Most of the basic ideas are illustrated using a two-period model of government investment that captures the future cost of policies that favor the present (Chapters 2-3). The more subtle and advanced issues are illustrated and, in some cases, quantified, using the overlapping-generations model of economic growth (Chapters 4-6). The models used to illustrate the mechanisms of economic growth are extended to incorporate politics and the behavior of public officials (Chapters 3, 5-7). The text concludes with a thorough discussion of policy reforms designed to address the issues discussed in earlier chapters. Intended for students familiar with intermediate-level economics, the book contains a technical appendix, including detailed explanations of each model, end-of-chapter questions and problems, and a complete solutions manual, making it ideal for self-study. Offering a unified explanation for the causes and consequences of government failure, fiscal crisis, and the needed policy reforms, this text is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses in macroeconomics, political economy, and public policy.

Exploring more than 500 years of the country's history, Italy provides readers interested in modern Italy or European history with a greater understanding of Italy's past, from the Renaissance to the present. This guide presents the milestones in Italy's history in an interesting and readable way.

This is the first book to explore the causes of the decline of British manufacturing in the 20th century by focusing on the troubled relationship between banks and small firms in a comparative historical perspective. Since the mid-1970s, the 'rediscovery' of small firms and of the important role they have played in the economies of continental Europe have occupied a substantial part of the literature on the sources of economic competitiveness. In Britain, the relationship between banks and industry has been the object of intense speculation since before the First World War. Since then banks have been accused by the business community, academics and politicians of neglecting industrial finance and by doing so of reducing the competitiveness of British firms. By comparing the rise of small firms in France, Germany and Italy and their decline in Britain this book analyses how the structure of these countries' banking systems has affected small firms' growth. This analysis is placed in the historical context of the political economy of these four countries, to show how banking and industrial structures developed over the century as a consequence of the state's need to mediate between different social and economic groups. This approach allows the author to show why British banking came to be so concentrated and the negative impact that this had on the supply of finance to small firms. The experiences of France, Germany and Italy show alternative structures and policy responses towards small firms.

Publisher Description

This book examines school acts in the long nineteenth century, traditionally considered as milestones or landmarks in the process of achieving universal education. Guided by a strong interest in social, cultural, and economic history, the case studies featured in the book rethink the actual value, the impact, and the ostensible purpose of school acts. The thirteen national case studies focus on the manner in which school acts were embedded in their particular historical contexts, offering a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of school acts and the role they played in the rise of mass schooling. Drawing together research from countries across the West, the editors and contributors analyse why these acts were passed, as well as their content and impact. This seminal collection will appeal to students and scholars of school acts and the history of mass schooling. Chapter 9 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification provides, for the first time, a comprehensive, quantitative "new economic history" of Italy.

Between 1861 and 1865, both the Confederate South and Southern Italy underwent dramatic processes of nation-building, with the creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, in the midst of civil wars. This is the first book that compares these parallel developments by focusing on the Unionist and pro-Bourbon political forces that opposed the two new nations in inner civil conflicts. Overlapping these conflicts were the social revolutions triggered by the rebellions of American slaves and Southern Italian peasants against the slaveholding and landowning elites. Utilizing a comparative perspective, Enrico Dal Lago sheds light on the reasons why these combined factors of internal opposition proved fatal for the Confederacy in the American Civil War, while the Italian Kingdom survived its own civil war. At the heart of this comparison is a desire to understand how and why nineteenth-century nations rose and either endured or disappeared.

How does Europe’s economic crisis affect the ways in which industry and entrepreneurship are experienced on a grassroots level? The book offers an answer to this question by exploring the Italian jewellery town of Valenza and the downturn of its principal industry. Through the experiences of its inhabitants, the study investigates the social role that jewellery production had in Valenza and provides an ethnographic account of the crisis the city endures. This analysis delves into the relationship between a community and its industry in order to understand the social and cultural challenges Italy and Europe will face in the future.

This book delves into the origins and evolution of trademark and branding practices in a wide range of geographical areas and periods, providing key knowledge for academics, professionals, and general audiences on the complex world of brands. The volume compiles the work of twenty-five prominent worldwide scholars studying the origins and evolution of trademarks and branding practices from medieval times to present days and from distinct European countries to the USA, New Zealand, Canada, Latin America, and the Soviet Union. The first part of the book provides new insights on pre-modern craft marks, on the emergence of trademark legal regimes during the nineteenth century, and on the evolution of trademark and business strategies in distinct regions, sectors, and contexts. As industrialisation and globalisation spread during the twentieth century, trademarking led to modern branding and international marketing, a process driven by new economic, but also cultural factors. The second part of the book explores the cultural side of the brand and offers challenging studies on how luxury, fashion, culture associations, and the consolidation of national identities played a key role in nowadays branding. This edited volume will not only be of great value to scholars, students and policymakers interested in trademark/branding research, but to marketing and legal practitioners as well, aiming to delve into the origins of modern brand strategies. The chapters in this book were originally published as two special issues of the journal, Business History.