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First Movers and the Growth of Small Industry in Northeastern Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Thomas H. Baker
Thomas H. Baker
Affiliation:
German National Research Center for Computer Science GMD
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Extract

In the 1970s, Italy's economy grew faster than all in the industrialized world but Japan's. Its growth rates of up to 5 percent, although lower than in the 1960s, compared favorably to the relatively flat figures from Britain, Germany, and the United States, most strikingly in the two years after the second oil shock of 1979. Following its first “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote The Economist, Italy's “second, lesser miracle” was how the country continued to thrive in the 1970s despite a “bumbling bureaucracy,” ineffective governments, high inflation and public debt, terrorism, and “the left-wing unions’ greedy, if understandable, reaction to the headlong development of the 1960s.” Italy's rapid growth was all the more impressive in light of the ongoing economic stagnation of the South and a general crisis in the big corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont, which had been dragged down by high oil prices, recession abroad, and indexed wages.

Type
Economies of Small Scale
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 1994 , pp. 621 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1994

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23 In order to show more clearly when these sectors were first formed, I excluded secondary ventures started by established firms and traced subsidiaries back to their parent firms. Where existing firms were refounded for tax purposes or transformed through inheritance or buyout, the table reflects when they were first founded.

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