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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
In the 1970s, Italy's economy grew faster than all in the industrialized world but Japan's. Its growth rates of up to 5 percent, although lower than in the 1960s, compared favorably to the relatively flat figures from Britain, Germany, and the United States, most strikingly in the two years after the second oil shock of 1979. Following its first “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote The Economist, Italy's “second, lesser miracle” was how the country continued to thrive in the 1970s despite a “bumbling bureaucracy,” ineffective governments, high inflation and public debt, terrorism, and “the left-wing unions’ greedy, if understandable, reaction to the headlong development of the 1960s.” Italy's rapid growth was all the more impressive in light of the ongoing economic stagnation of the South and a general crisis in the big corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont, which had been dragged down by high oil prices, recession abroad, and indexed wages.
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23 In order to show more clearly when these sectors were first formed, I excluded secondary ventures started by established firms and traced subsidiaries back to their parent firms. Where existing firms were refounded for tax purposes or transformed through inheritance or buyout, the table reflects when they were first founded.
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27 started the firm in 1921 with promissory notes from numerous parishioners in San Daniele, but conflicts with the Fascist authorities and with competing firms, together with the world depression after 1929, brought it to bankruptcy in 1931, saddling several working-class families with decades of debt.
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