2025/09/02 by Cesare Vagge · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Italy: Economic History and Contemporary Issues
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/1354571x.2025.2538341
openalex publication_date 2025/09/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/13
The postwar Italian Republic constituted a variety of ‘state-led democracy’: a democratic polity characterized by a significant expansion of public power in the form of expert-led economic planning agencies. Postwar Italy relied on planning bodies, such as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (I.R.I.), to guide economic reconstruction. These agencies had, however, been the cornerstones of the technocratic ‘developmental state’, created by the Fascist regime in the 1930s. Scholars such as Paul Ginsborg emphasized how the postwar survival of the developmental state was the exclusive product of the reforms pursued by the De Gasperi governments after 1947–1948. Building upon the works of historians like Rolf Petri, this article instead argues that the postwar preservation of planning bodies, such as I.R.I. resulted from the technocratic sympathies of ideologically heterogeneous economic experts active inside the Italian Resistance, who intended to rescue the developmental state since 1944–1945.