This essay focuses on Francesco Vito (1902–1968), one of the most important Italian economists and a contributor to an extensive, thorough debate in Catholic social thinking, a debate at times accompanied and followed by exacting and solid experience in the real world, in an effort to turn into action the mediation between the Gospel and history proposed by Catholic social thinking. Economists made that effort under the influence of what could be regarded as the last stage of a tradition that was already present in the culture of economic matters and behavior and had previously been expressed as the preoccupation of Catholic intellectuals and politicians with the novelty of “modern” phenomena. It was a continuation but, of course, a renewed one.
This essay—mainly dealing with Vito; Giuseppe Toniolo (1845–1918), one of Vito's key mentors; and Luigi L. Pasinetti (b. 1930), one of Vito's most important students—emphasizes the basic difference that Vito conceives between faith and religion, on the one hand, and between the importance of the documents of the authoritative official social Magisterium of the Catholic Church, on the other—which cannot be disregarded or underestimated—and the historical relevance of the debates and the intellectual and factual work preceding and following those debates. This cross-analysis, which takes into account both sides of the question, that is, both the solid faith of people who see themselves as belonging to the cultural framework of Catholic moral teaching and their secular nature as people engaged in temporal affairs who order these according to the plan of God and live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life—in our case, economists by profession—is a challenging subject for a historian of economic thought.
Recent historiography on the interest of Italian economists in American economic thought is becoming rich and valuable. Thanks to these sources, we know that this interest arose because several Italian economists were attracted by the realism featured in North American economic investigation, by the importance attributed to both statistical measurement and historical analysis, and by the pluralism of approaches and vital eclecticism of American social scientists. Among Italian economists, Luigi Einaudi acknowledged such scientific vitality, and held the role of advisor for the selection of Italian candidates for Rockefeller fellowships. With Luigi De Simone of the University of Naples, the second Italian economist selected for a study program in the United States was Giovanni Demaria, who established a long-lasting relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation (1930-1958): first as a student (1930-1931), then as the Rector of the Bocconi University (1947-1952), and finally as an authoritative economist and the President of the Societŕ Italiana degli Economisti (1953-1958).
This essay deals with some key Italian contributions to econometrics in the twentieth century. It opens with some notes on the need to define and measure each dimension of the manifold notion of well-being. While considering the convinced supporters of the methodological adoption of tools devised by economics and statistics, the central part of the essay focuses on Corrado Gini (1884–1965). He was Italy's leading econometrician and the main reference of the international network of econometricians until the 1940s. Other Italian members of the newly formed Econometric Society are also cited, specifically Luigi Amoroso and Umberto Ricci, because of the relevance of their contribution. The essay concludes by referring to Gini's rejection of econometrics, which coincided with the appearance of a new generation of social scientists whose aim was to combine economics, statistics, and mathematics.
This paper investigates the Italian debate on municipalization between the 1880s and the 1920s and is divided into two parts. The first deals with the emergence of the municipalization in the late nineteenth century as a component in the birth of the Social State. The second part concerns the analytical tools elaborated by some leading Italian economists in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when municipalization was the expression of an entire lifecycle, with an early expanding stage (until World War I) and a later stage (under Fascism) of prevalent stagnation.Public enterprises, monopoly, welfare economics, history of economic thought,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.