The Atlantic divide: methodological and epistemological differences in economic history

In the paper the development of economic history will be placed within the evolution of Western thought and culture. Therefore an analysis of the connections between economic history and contemporary epistemology will be carried out. In this perspective an analogy with the traditional division between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy would appear to be useful for economic history too: the first had long prevailed in Anglo-Saxon, the second in continental, culture. This partition evokes and embraces the antithesis between scientific and humanist culture, between logic and rhetoric, analysis and interpretation, conceptual clarification and visions of the world. The paper suggest that the opposition that loomed large over the post W.W.II decades between Anglo-American and European economic histories can also be conceived as a specific form of the wider opposition between ‘analytic style’ and ‘continental style’.economic history, methodology, epistemology, cliometrics, business history, economic thought

Energy Supply And Economic Development In Italy: The Role Of The State-Owned Companies

The paper focuses on the role played by state-owned enterprise in the energy history and policy in Italy. A fundamental issue of the economic history of the country is if and how scarcity of raw materials, and particularly of primary energy sources, affected its modern economic growth. As different as they are, answers to such a question cannot but recognize the role played in the long run by direct state intervention: either in order to reduce the energy dependence of the country from abroad, or to guarantee the supply of fuel and oil products to the Italian market, particularly after the 1973 oil crisis.Italy, energy, history, state-intervention

Boundaries and governance of Italian state-owned enterprise: a quantitative approach

For the most part of the last century the role of State owned enterprises was probably more pronounced, continuous and prolonged in Italy than elsewhere in the West. This was the response to the fact that Italian economic growth had long been penalized by structural frailties such as a narrow internal market, a shortage of capital, financial weakness and a decline of entrepreneurial initiative. Yet, the complexity of forms and organizations assumed by the State direct intervention in the economy (just to limit our analysis to the central level) reached heights of imagination and ingenuity in Italy that were probably unknown abroad: State companies, State monopolies, shareholding companies, State concerns and so on co-existed throughout the twentieth century. This helps to explaining why we do not yet have a precise and thorough measure of the weight of public enterprise on the entire economy, not to say of more specific data concerning their sectorial and/or regional distribution. Thus it has not been so far possible to identify precisely - at a micro level - the real dimension of Italian public enterprise, and hence assess a phenomenon whose actual magnitude remains unknown to us. The aim of our paper is to fill this gap by showing the basic features of the dimension, boundaries, structure, governance and location of Italian SOEs.Italy, State owned enterprise, size and structure, governance, economic history

Opening the black box of Entrepreneurship: the Italian case in a historical perspective

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the Second industrial revolution and the end of the XX century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an empirical based-taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs not exclusively based on intuitions and qualitative judgments, we provide valuable interpretative elements; second, we put forward some hypothesis about the relationship between entrepreneurship and Italian economic growth. In particular we perform a Cluster Analysis which singles out five different entrepreneurial typologies characterized by a widespread tendency to searching for new markets, yet a scarce attitude towards innovation. Further we suggest that the evolution of the institutional context slowed down the development of the entrepreneurial abilities and virtues necessary to grow.History of Entrepreneurship; Italian capitalism

Italian Entrepreneurship: Conjectures and Evidence from a Historical Perspective

This paper is the first product of an ongoing research on the determinants and the role of entrepreneurship in Italian economic development. Its primary aim is the creation of a data-set of Italian entrepreneurs for the period encompassed between the Unification of the Kingdom (1861) and the end of the XXth century. The main source of the research is a collection of 390 entrepreneurial biographies, prepared for an ongoing Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs. The first part of the paper presents a descriptive analysis of the main peculiarities of the country’s entrepreneurship on the basis of a few standard variables traditionally used in economic analysis. The second one refines the descriptive approach through a methodology – Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis – usual by now in standard statistics, yet not very familiar to scholars in economic and/or business history. This has allowed us to single out a few entrepreneurial typologies of the history of Italian capitalism which partly confirm the “traditional” features already emphasized by historiography; such as the prominence of northern entrepreneurs, the strong relations both with own and partner’s families, the almost total absence of female entrepreneurs and an essentially middle-class rooted entrepreneurship. However a few novel interesting aspects emerge, the most surprising being the good level of formal education of the sample: a neat majority (60%) has a medium/high degree and almost one third an university degree.Business history, Italian entrepreneurship, cluster analysis

L'incipit del Pater noster (Mt. 6, 9) (proposta di correzione della formula ...qui es in caelis)

L'autore ha tentato di dimostrare -- magari soltanto come provocazione, o ludus intellettuale --, anche attraverso il confronto con alcuni esempi di prosatori greci, che la traduzione latina (la cosiddetta «Vulgata») dell'invocazione iniziale del «Pater noster» non corrisponde perfettamente, sotto l'aspetto sintattico, e di conseguenza concettuale, all'originale greco: la versione ideale, più esatta, anziché Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sarebbe *Pater noster caelestis. Anche le traduzioni in alcune lingue moderne, in quanto rifatte sulla versione latina, sono soggette allo stesso difetto, e dunque anch'esse suscettibili di correzione.The author has tried to demonstrate -maybe only as a provocation or intellectual ludus-, also through a comparison with some examples from Greek prose writers, that the Latin translation (the so called Vulgata) of the initial invocation of the Pater noster does not correspond perfectly, under the syntactical -and consequently conceptual- aspect, to the Greek original: the more correct ideal version, instead of Pater noster, qui es in caelis, should be *Pater noster caelestis. Also the translations into some modern languages, being done on the Latin version, are subject to the same defect, and so they too are susceptible of emendation

Una nota sulla storia del concetto di imprenditore

Relativamente alla figura dell’imprenditore, appare assumere una certa consistenza l'ipotesi che si sia a lungo mantenuta una sorta di dicotomia fra due tradizioni di ricerca: quella prevalente sul continente europeo, che, prendendo le mosse dall'Italia tardo-medievale, giunge fino a Schumpeter e ai suoi epigoni; e quella anglosassone, che sviluppatasi nell'Inghilterra della scuola classica avrà poi nell'America del Novecento l'ambiente ideale per la sua affermazione. Nella tradizione continentale, in cui prevale un approccio ermeneutico/interpretativo, la rappresentazione del processo economico lascia spazio per l'agire individuale e per la vitalità e la creatività dei soggetti economici. In quella anglosassone, invece, sempre più caratterizzata da uno "stile" analitico\ la ricerca del funzionamento oggettivo del sistema economico rigetta un'analisi del comportamento individuale distinta, e indipendente, dalle dinamiche delle macrograndezze economiche

Sull'ode a Fidile (Hor. carm. 3, 23)

With regard to the Horatian ode to Fidile, you find here some variations in comparison with the usually accepted exegesis, especially with reference to the last strophe: the difficulties are particularly related to the meaning of the adjective immunis (v. 17) — including the apparent contradiction between immunis… manus ( with the meaning of “empty hand”) of v. 17 and the gifts, of poor value, mentioned in vv. 3-4 —, as well as the syntagms sumptuosa… hostia (v. 18) and aversos Penatis (v. 19). To conclude, you find the proposal of a translation offering an interpretation of the ode that is altogether satisfactory and free from particular difficulties

Vecchiaia e morte in Mimnermo : nota A 1 W.,2

En la elegía 1 W., Mimnermo espera que llegue la muerte cuando la vida ya no le ofrezca más amor. Según nos parece, él no desea “morir", sino “estar ya muerto" cuando lo alcance la vejez, como parece indicar el perfecto del v. 2, que permite intuir también su miedo a la muerte.In the elegy 1 W. Mimnermo wishes the death when life won’t offer him love any more: as a matter of fact, in my opinion, he does not wish “to die", but “to be already dead" when the old age will reach him, as the perfect of v. 2 seems to indicate, which lets also guess his fear of the decease.Fil: Perotti, Pier Angelo

Endogenous Preferences and Private Provision of Public Goods: a Double Critical Mass Model

In this paper we set up an evolutionary game-theoretic model aimed at addressing the issue of local public good provision via direct commitment of voluntary forces (namely, private donors and nonprofit providers) only. Two classes of agents are assumed to strategically interact within a double critical mass model, where the provision and maintenance, on voluntary bases, of a public-type good is concerned. Uncertainty as to equilibrium outcomes emerges as within both categories a positive proportion of agents faces the temptation to opportunistically free ride on others efforts. Further, private donors and nonprofit providers payoff functions are interdependent, in the sense that (a) potential donors decide to be actual donors only insofar as a large enough proportion of nonprofit organizations provides a high effort level, otherwise they act as free riders; (b) nonprofit organizations, in turn, prefer to exert a high productive effort only insofar as a large enough proportion of potential donors acts as actual donors, otherwise they exert a low effort level. Through this analytical framework, we are able to focus on the critical factors affecting the dynamic outcome of such interaction: under certain conditions, in a medium-long run perspective, even in contexts where, initially, either a large proportion of agents behaves as free riders or a large proportion of nonprofit organizations exerts a low effort level, the local public good may be provided.Public Goods; Evolutionary Crowding-out; Voluntary Sector;