Current debates on austerity often forget that these policies are almost a hundred years old. This article explores how the combination of austerity and technocracy acted as a powerful tool to secure the compliance of European countries with socio‐economic stabilization after the First World War. Austerity emerged as an economic, moral, and technocratic message as economic experts sought to educate restless post‐war civil society. The article analyses primary austerity documents from the international economic conferences of Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922). In addition, I use a case study of Italy (1922–1925) to show how austerity succeeded under the first years of Fascism, when the government authorized prominent economics professors to implement the international financial codes devised at Brussels and Genoa. I also consider the scientific writings of De Stefani, Ricci, and Pantaleoni in order to examine the theoretical roots of the technocratic nature of austerity.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. decline. We propose a methodology and a taxonomy that will characterize countries' growth patterns on the basis of the sequence of regimes they experience. In particular, we emphasize the difference between expansionary and recessionary regimes and, after classifying the growth pattern of all 123 developing countries in our dataset, we explore cross-sectional empirical regularities which emerge during upward and downward growth phases. Results show that expansionary regimes are associated with convergence and positive correlation between growth and (short run) volatility. On the contrary, in recessionary regimes, poorer countries face deeper failures and a negative correlation between growth and volatility is found, signifying that output fluctuates less around the trend during strong rather than mild recessions. Finally, we discover that regimes of growth and recession show similar average length (about 16 years). Although recessions on average are remarkably pronounced (14% loss), during expansions the magnitude of growth is much larger. Terms of use: Documents in JEL codes: O11, O40, O47Keywords: growth, structural breaks, expansionary and recessionary regimes, convergence * Corresponding author: Francesco Lamperti, piazza Martiri della Libertà 33, 56127, Pisa (Italy), email address:f.lamperti@sssup.it. The authors want to thank Flavio Calvino, Claude Diebolt, Giovanni Dosi, Andrea Mario Lavezzi and Andrea Roventini for useful comments and suggestions. All the shortcomings are our own.

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The historical forerunners of contemporary austerity are still largely unexplored. This essay considers the "liberal phase" of Fascist Italy (1922-1925) as a case study to explain austerity as a full-blown rationality, that is intrinsically, and simultaneously, theory and practice, encompassing the moral, the economic and the political. My explanation moves beyond the interpretation of austerity as the post-1980, neoliberal recipe of price deflation and budget cuts. The Italian case draws attention to a neglected connection: that between austerity and repression. Austerity was the guiding principle of the Fascist economic agenda during the 1920s. It served to extinguish the effects of the democratization process of the post-WWI years. The paper examines the work of four distinguished economists, Maffeo Pantaleoni, Luigi Einaudi, Alberto De Stefani and Umberto Ricci, who-in different roles as professors, journalists, advisors, and policy-makerscan be considered the source, the guardians and the enforcers of Fascist austerity.

Ralph G. Hawtrey was not a man of the backwaters. Through the parallel study of Treasury files and Hawtrey’s scholarly publications, this work reveals his direct influence upon the most commanding minds of the Treasury and the Bank of England, the two institutions that, after WWI, shared primary responsibility over the British austerity agenda. After the war, Hawtrey advocated drastic budgetary and monetary rigor in the name of price stabilization. From 1922, Hawtrey admitted the need to decrease the bank rate; yet he remained an adamant supporter of the gold standard, insisting on its maintenance even if it required further monetary revaluation. Hawtrey’s policy prescriptions stemmed directly from his economic model. The “crowding-out argument,” the centrality of credit and of savings, together with the operational priority of technocratic institutions, were essential theoretical underpinnings of Hawtrey’s agenda: implementing the so-called Treasury view.