La lunga erosione: regimi monetari, vincoli esterni e sovranità economica dell'Italia dal 1944 al 2026

The Long Erosion: Monetary Regimes, External Constraints and Italy's Economic Sovereignty from 1944 to 2026

Mario Giorgione

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper reconstructs Italy's economic trajectory from the Bretton Woods agreements (1944) to 2026, around a central question: how did one of the world's leading industrial economies become, within thirty years, the slowest-growing country in the euro area? The thesis is that the decline is not the outcome of a single event, but of a sequence of surrendered policy instruments: monetary sovereignty with the divorce between the Treasury and the Bank of Italy (1981), the exchange rate with euro adoption (1999-2002), fiscal policy with the balanced-budget rule in the Constitution and the Fiscal Compact (2012), and control over large companies through the privatisations and foreign acquisitions that began in 1992. The interpretive framework, which builds on the Italian post-Keynesian tradition and in particular on Nino Galloni, distinguishes four capitalist models and tests them against data and documentary sources. The analysis follows Italian governments from the post-war period to the Meloni government, assessing them against stated indicators, and links economic erosion to recent social tensions without attributing them to a single design. The paper closes with a diagnosis, policy proposals and three scenarios to 2035, framed within Ray Dalio's theory of cycles and US-China competition. The paper is written in Italian (Working Paper No. 1/2026, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23787475).

Keywords: Italy; economic sovereignty; Bretton Woods; euro; privatisation; public debt; real wages; social unrest; political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H63 N33 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10-30
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