Economic policy

Fascist intervention in the economy was designed to boost prestige and military strength. In the early years the Fascists compromised with the business establishment and rescued failing banks. However, in 1926 the lira was suddenly revalued for political reasons, and Italy suffered all the usual consequences of an overvalued currency. Exports fell sharply, unemployment rose, wages were frozen or even cut, and prices fell. The steel, electricity, and chemical industries expanded, for their markets were domestic, and they were helped by cheaper raw material imports; industries producing textiles, food, and vehicles, which depended on foreign markets, declined.

When the Great Depression came after 1929, these deflationary processes were accentuated, although the government increased spending on building roads and on welfare in order to provide employment. The leading banks, which had lent heavily to industry, had to be rescued in the early 1930s, as did many large industrial companies. Two new state-run holding companies, the Italian Industrial Finance Institute (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano; IMI) and the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale; IRI), were set up to bail out failing firms and to provide capital for new industrial investment; they also provided trained managers and effective financial supervision. Italy thus acquired a huge, state-led industrial sector, which was especially important in banking, steel, shipping, armaments, and the supply of hydroelectricity. However, these firms were not nationalized. Instead, they operated in the market as private companies and still had many private shareholders. In the long term they gave Italy a modern infrastructure—including roads and cheap energy—a sounder financial sector, and some efficient modern industries in expanding sectors such as chemicals and synthetic fibers. Most industrial development, and most workers, remained in northern Italy, although by this time large steelmaking and shipbuilding plants had been started at Naples and Taranto. After 1931 vast tracts of land were reclaimed through the draining of marshes in the Lazio region, where gleaming new towns were created with Fascist architecture and names—Littoria (now Latina) in 1932, Sabaudia in 1934, Pontinia in 1935, Aprilia in 1937, and Pomezia in 1938. Peasants were brought from the regions of Emilia and the Veneto to populate these towns. New towns, such as Carbonia, were also built in Sardinia to house miners for the revamped coal industry.

After October 1925 the Fascist syndicates, or trade unions, were the sole recognized negotiators for workers’ interests. Strikes and lockouts became illegal, and wages fell between 1927 and 1934, but the syndicates had considerable political influence. They secured a shorter workweek (40 hours in November 1934), higher welfare benefits (such as family allowances, also introduced in 1934), and public works schemes, and they also helped run leisure and social activities. In 1934 the Fascists also set up “corporations”—mixed bodies of workers and employers—to resolve labor disputes and supervise wage settlements. Despite much rhetoric and propaganda about them, they had little impact in practice and virtually none on industrial management or economic policy making.

In agricultural policy, the government aimed at self-sufficiency by encouraging grain production after 1925 (“the battle for wheat”). Mussolini was filmed and photographed as he cut grain, bare-chested, in fields throughout Italy. Grain was grown for symbolic reasons in city centers such as Milan’s Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square). A high tariff was reimposed on imported wheat, and grain prices were kept artificially high. Production rose sharply as northern farmers used more chemical fertilizers. In much of the south the climate was less favorable for growing wheat, but vineyards and olive groves were nonetheless plowed up, especially after 1929 when the world price of olive oil halved. The real beneficiaries of this policy were the large farmers of the Po valley and of the southern latifundia. These men also benefited most from the government’s land-reclamation schemes, forming their own consortia and receiving government money to drain or irrigate their own land. Moreover, during the Depression they could buy land cheaply from the smaller landowners because many of the peasants who had acquired land during and after World War I were forced to sell after 1926.

After Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36, the League of Nations subjected the Italian economy to sanctions. This led to a more extensive drive for national self-sufficiency, or autarky; imports were replaced where possible by native products, and most exports were diverted to Germany and Switzerland or to Africa. Ethiopia, once conquered, became a vast drain on resources. The government expanded its intervention and licensing role, encouraged official cartels and quasi monopolies, and shifted resources from above to heavy industry and armaments. All this led to budget deficits, big tax increases, and capital levies, which were hugely resented because they mainly went to pay for wars in Africa and Spain. Resented too was the obvious corruption of the Fascist governing clique, without whose permits—available at a price—nothing could be done. Among the members of the various conservative groups, including those in the army, the civil service, the law, and the church, which in the mid-1920s had looked to fascism to protect their interests, some had realized by the late 1930s that fascism was unreliable and began to withdraw their support.

American restrictions, European recession, and Fascist economic nationalism combined to curtail emigration drastically in the 1930s, from more than 600,000 people per annum before 1914 to fewer than 50,000 per annum. The closing of emigration outlets hit the south particularly badly. Because they could not go abroad, rural Italians moved to the cities. Rome doubled in size between 1921 and 1940, and northern cities attracted many rural emigrants, especially from the south. Fascism attempted to halt these movements through an anti-migration law in 1938. This measure banned migrants from moving within Italy without a job at their intended destination, and made many Italians “clandestine” in their own country. However, the law had little practical effect in preventing migration. Meanwhile, government policy encouraged population growth by providing tax incentives to have children and excluding the childless from public jobs. Admittedly, all this had little effect before 1937. Italians married later than ever and had fewer children than previously, so much so that in several northern and central regions the birth rate dropped below replacement level in the 1930s.