As regards their recent history, Morocco and Tunisia are often analysed as similar cases studies, owing mainly to the lesser importance of oil revenues compared with the rest of North Africa. This simplistic representation, due in part to the insensitivity of the main international financial institutions (IFIs), IMF and World Bank, to cross-country differences, would preclude analysis of some of the factors that marked the first phase of the structural redefinition of the two countries and the onset of these processes in the broader context of the crisis and the redefinition of the international economic system starting in the late 1970s and early ’80s. From this perspective, and precisely because of the profound differences, the Tunisian and Moroccan cases prove to be complementary. As exogenous as the crises were, so were the solutions proposed, based on identical macro-objectives and theoretical assumptions, although their relative importance varied between the two. In Morocco, the intervention of IMF and World Bank – even in the context of partially discordant agendas – would be determined by the decision to ensure debt service, in line with the general strategy adopted for the debt crisis of medium-income countries, and would result in a policy of austerity and an investment blockade with lasting effects that cast doubt on the effectiveness of the intervention as early as the ’90s and eventually made pursuit of the liberalisation side of the two institutions’ agenda impossible. I
This paper considers Italy’s short but intense colonisation of Eritrea in light of the more well-known European colonial histories in Africa. We review the Italian historiography on Italy’s involvement in Eritrea, supplementing it with novel archival data. The focus is on the activities of private enterprises and agricultural settlements, and on the Italian state’s colonial spending, particularly during Fascism. We reflect on the actual effects of these factors on Eritrea’s development, as against those predicted by the leading theories, and show how these highlight the somewhat atypical nature of the case of Eritrea.
Africa is a vast continent with more than a billion inhabitants in 54 countries and highly variegated political, economic, climatic and social conditions. Human mobility within a continent that has been the cradle of various cultures dates to prehistoric times. By the mid21st century, Africa’s population will reach two billion and account for almost a quarter of the planet’s inhabitants. The continent will also continue to stand out for the low average age of the population (currently 19 years). Urbanization is increasing, with between 40% and 70% of the population living in cities, depending on the context, while the lack of comparable growth in economic and social resources is leading to a worsening of living conditions, with inevitable repercussions on already intense migratory flows. Forced or voluntary migration is, first of all, internal to the continent. But what are the reasons for emigration? Of the legacies that weigh on the history and present of Africa, the slave trade and colonialism are among the heaviest. This paper reviews the literature on the drivers of African migration, focusing particularly on African perceptions of Europe, and discusses the state of the art in the production of data on migration and its usability in the light of current conceptual and methodological issues.
The purpose of this study is to examine whether the transition from a system of various issuing banks to a monopoly system was a step in the Bank of Spain becoming a central bank in the true sense of the word (a non-profit maximizing bank); or on the contrary, whether the Bank used its privilege as the only issuing institution to obtain extra profits, and neglected its duties as a central bank. The study shows that thanks to the monopoly, the Spanish issuer obtained extraordinary profits (above the average for the sector). We also show that the Bank's private interest prevailed over the interest (convertibility into gold) and that the monopoly was not a decisive step in its becoming a genuine central bank. The Bank of Spain was a very profitable financial institution for its shareholders, and little concerned with the public interest. History shows that the Bank of Spain's transformation into an institution responsible for monetary and financial policy did not occur until well into the twentieth century.
This article takes a radically new approach to the fiscal collapse of the Lancastrian state prior to the Wars of the Roses. Whereas previous studies have sought to locate the origins of the infamous £372,000 royal debt declared before parliament in 1449-50 in the short-term fiscal political context of Henry VI’s troubled kingship during the late 1440s, the present article documents the development of a longer-term structural crisis in the public finances. During the conciliar rule of Henry VI’s early majority in the late 1430s and early 1440s, parliamentary-controlled income declined markedly as a result of historically low indirect tax yields and MPs’ unwillingness, at a time of growing socio-economic problems, to respond to the king’s personal fiscal overtures and grant the required level of compensatory lay taxation to fund heavy expenditures. Consequently, a mounting deficit characterised all areas of the royal budget, whilst the total deficit doubled. As affairs of state gravitated towards Henry VI’s court around 1444, total debt was already well in excess of £300,000. Viewed in the context of R.J. Bonney and W.M. Ormrod’s “new” fiscal historiography, these developments signify that the political and economic limits of the medieval English “tax state” had been reached, thus paving the way for a structural fiscal regression to a low-yield “domain” state from the 1450s
World War Two, rationing, and shortages limited the amount of food and other goods available to households. The new welfare state of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party and derationing were supposed to provide food and other consumption goods to meet the needs of households, but voters were dissatisfied. Churchill’s Conservative Party, with a campaign promising to end rationing quickly, regained power. It is unclear how rationing affected households’ expenditure adjustments in the short and long run. Our results show that income and own-price elasticities varied considerably in both the short and long run before, during and after the war. Varying elasticities provide insight into how households adjusted their expenditures over time. Food is typically an essential consumption item, but estimates show it was almost a luxury good during the war and in the postwar period. There is evidence that households were unable to make typical long-run desired expenditure adjustments during the war and for some time after it. Binding food rationing significantly affected spending on other goods and services. Rationing had a severe impact on household expenditures. The campaign to end rationing was pivotal in the Conservatives Party’s landslide victory
Many growth analysts have argued that more equal patterns of landownership and the supremacy of industry over agriculture were associated with the rise of mass public education systems during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The theoretical framework of this argument relies mainly on the so-called capitalskill complementarity hypothesis that agricultural land and industrial capital are characterized by different levels of complementarity with human skills. Thus, landowning elites were often reluctant to promote and support public education, while rising capitalists were much more in favour of a better-educated workforce and promoted major educational reforms. This paper seeks to provide some of the first empirical evidence of a significant positive relationship between more equitable distribution of landholdings and the development of literacy in late nineteenth-century Greece, using data from the Censuses of 1870 and 1879. Our estimates largely confirm previous findings of a positive and significant linkage between people’s access to land and literacy rates. On the contrary, labour concentration in the farm sector (the agriculture trap) has been found to be negatively and significantly related to literacy. These results remain robust after controlling for such other socioeconomic factors as marital status, family size, urbanization, ethnicity, religion, students’ attainment and teachers’ availability.
Combating the expansion of criminal organizations has long been on the agenda of the European Union, but to date the steps towards the adoption of a common strategy have been timid. And this despite the European Union’s request for alignment of the laws and regulations of the Member States. Intensive work commencing in 2012 eventually produced Directive 2014/42EU on the freezing and confiscation of instrumentalities and proceeds of crime in the European Union, modelled on Law 109/1996 enacted by Italy. Another step in this direction was the approval in 2016 by the European Parliament of the report on the fight against corruption, which renews the Commission’s request for criminal association to be made punishable and for the adoption of specific legislation on “a particular type of criminal organization whose members take advantage of the power of intimidation of the associative bond and of the condition of subjection and silence” (Article 416-bis of the Italian penal code), allowing “confiscation in the absence of definitive conviction.” Harmonized legislation has yet to be adopted, however; in particular, there is no reference model for combating criminal organizations in economic terms or for the construction of barriers in civil society.1 The Italian experience in the fight against mafia-style criminal organizations, based on the social reutilization of confiscated assets and the construction of an economy alternative to organized crime, could be a useful reference model for EU member countries in constructing a homogeneous European system for combating criminal gangs.
In the first half of the twentieth century a variety of factors – stagnant extraction processes, fierce competition from abroad, less favourable geological endowment, unstable demand during the interwar years – led Belgian coal producers to unify in order to preserve their production capacities. This paper takes the presence of massive coal imports in the Belgian market into account by using a three-equation theoretical model derived from industrial economics to assess the impact of the economic cycle on Belgian coal producers’ market power within their domestic market. The results indicate that collusive strategies had a significant impact on the relationship between the economic cycle and the price-cost margin in the Belgian coal industry. In particular, the estimates do not contradict the findings of Haltiwanger and Harrington (1991)
The territories between Casal di Principe and the Domitian Coast have been at the center of the migratory dynamics that have involved Italy for several decades. The massive use of immigrants for agricultural labor and the murder of Jerry Essan Masslo are elements of a crucial chapter of the history of Italian immigration. Another is the pastoral work of Father Peppe Diana, realizing full fraternity in the encounter with immigrants and inspiring significant and extraordinarily interesting experiences of hospitality and integration in a difficult context. Models of social inclusion were developed that promoted new forms of active citizenship, transcending the logic of emergency which immigrants often face in one of the parts of Italy where organized crime is most deeply rooted. The result is an innovative approach to human relationships, rich in opportunities, which points the way to civil coexistence in an increasingly plural society; an original paradigm of civic ethics that injects much needed calm and objectivity into the debate on these issues.
This article analyses the increasing socio-economic segmentation of rural society in Northern Italy in the early modern era. With a synthesis of the historiography on the Italian countryside plus original archival research, we reconstruct the political role and the socioeconomic basis of rural elites in the State of Milan and in the Republic of Venice. We argue that, in general, the growing importance and the establishment of the rural elites were the result of more and more exclusive management of the commons, the concentration of landed property, and a near monopoly in local manufacturing and the local credit market.
