The enormous financial requirements of World War I overwhelmed the tax systems of all of the belligerents. None of the major participants in the struggle raised more than a quarter of wartime expenditure through taxes and other forms of revenue. As W.S. and E.S. Woytinsky state in a frequently quoted study, total war expenditure of the belligerents on a gold basis amounted to $200 bn., about five times pre-war expenditure, and the equivalent of five times the total state debt at the beginning of the war. The total outlay represented six and a half times the sum of all the national debt accumulated in the world from the end of the eighteenth century up to August 1914.

Within this generally dismal picture, the performance of Italy, as it is presented in the official budget statistics in Table 2 (Appendix, pp. 297), appears comparatively favorable. Revenue as a percentage of expenditure was consistently higher in Italy during the war years than in Germany and France, and only slightly lower than in Britain. These figures led contemporary observers, and after them historians, to judge the performance of Italy's tax system during World War I in a relatively favorable light. Aldcroft for example, in his classic study of the world economy in the 1920s, gives the following figures for war expenditures covered by revenue among the principal belligerents: France and Germany less than 2%, Italy 16%, Great Britain 20%, and the United States 23%.