Arianna Tassinari (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies / University of Bologna),
Lucio Baccaro (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies)
Once a thriving economy widely regarded as a model for catch-up growth for other advanced capitalist economies, Italy has versed into a situation of de facto economic stagnation for the past 25 years. Faced with long-term processes of transformation – globalization, integration into the European Monetary Union (EMU) and into global value chains, technological change – and successive crises – such as the Eurozone crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and, most recently, the Ukraine war and related inflation and energy crises – the capacity of Italian capitalism and of its institutional, political and productive foundations to adjust and respond effectively to emerging challenges has been repeatedly called into question. Notwithstanding some notable pockets of economic dynamism, Italian capitalism has arguably struggled more than other European economies to adjust effectively to the constraints posed by EMU integration, and has undergone a process of progressive peripheralization in many key sectors and global value chains. Successive waves of structural reforms in a trajectory of (neo)liberalization have engendered profound institutional transformations and dislodged long-standing complementarities, but with often questionable socio-economic outcomes with regard to labour market and wage dynamics, socio-economic inequalities and territorial disparities. In the face of the challenges of the environmental transition, the unfolding inflation crisis and the possible scenario of a new financial crisis, future prospects for Italy’s political economy appear as uncertain as ever, and the transformative potential of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan more limited than it might have been initially hoped.
In the face of these momentous challenges, it is timely to bring to bear the analytical and theoretical tools of (comparative and international) political economy and economic sociology to make sense of the trajectories of transformation of Italian capitalism in its regional and global context; of the social, political and ideational dynamics underpinning Italy’s structural economic issues; and of its capacity to face past, present and future challenges. The session calls for contributions in Italian or English addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- The trajectory of transformation of Italian capitalism, of its institutional foundations and of its structural characteristics in long-term and short-term perspective
- The causes and drivers of Italy’s economic performance
- The dynamics of Italy’s integration within EMU and its future prospects
- Italian capitalism in comparative perspective: similarities and divergences in a (south) European and global perspective
- Italy’s integration within the global economy: global value chains, global circuits of finance and capital and dynamics of peripheralisation
- Key actors in Italian capitalism (unions, employers, SMEs, large firms, banks…), their transformations and their interactions with each other and with the state
- The changing role of the state in Italian capitalism
- Change and continuity in key areas of economic and social policy
- Emerging drivers of transformation and their impact on Italian capitalism – technological change, the green transition, financialization, geopolitical instability
Papers adopting a comparative perspective or dealing with related IPE/CPE topics, even if not directly focused on the Italian case, are welcome.