The Italian Metaphysical Adventure of Economic Planning as Seen through the Italian Newspapers (1962-1964)

Abstract

The paper reconstructs the broad economic planning debate of the early nineteensixties through the more representative Italian newspapers. As it appears evident from my review, the obstacles that economic planning met were due mainly to exogenous factors such as the weakness of the political forces with respect to the important political and economic reforms they had announced with the first Centre-Left government, and the unexpected change in the economic conditions which shifts the political attention from the structural reforms to the anti-conjunctural policy. The political and economic debate involved three significant and strictly related moments, which represented the crucial, controversial questions: the interpretations of economic planning, the relation between long and short-term policy, and the prevailing version of the incomes policy as an instrument to restore the fifties development model.