This article examines the influence of the global financial turmoil on administrative capacity considered within the framework of the quality of democracy. In fact, administrative capacity is a significant component of the rule of law. However, laws consistent with a high democratic quality but deprived of a fair, transparent, efficient and impartial apparatus devoted to implementing them determine a rule of law broad, but shallow. By tracking the reaction to the economic crisis in Italy, this article tests the hypothesis suggested by Dunsire and Hood that episodes of financial austerity invest public administration following a specific sequence of events. The empirical analysis shows that the sequence triggered in Italy by the 2008 crisis has been shaped and constrained by the level of implementation of the different repertoires of responses to the 1992 crisis. The findings reveal that the current crisis has encouraged the adoption of transversal measures aimed at freezing public expenditure while the attempts of bureaucratic modernisation have been sidelined. Consequently, the financial turmoil has negatively affected the Italian administrative capacity. Adapted from the source document.
Long-term trends suggest that Italy's current economic crisis is not the result of an unfavourable business cycle or of the global economic and financial crisis. Instead, Italy's crisis accompanied by persistent slow economic growth is above all the result of decade-long structural shortcomings and impediments. Many factors explain why and how Italy experienced sluggish economic growth and increasingly uncompetitive productivity over decades. The causes of Italy's economic crisis are deeply rooted in the past and strictly interconnected. These causes will be discussed and analysed in a historical perspective. While embracing free economic market principles firmly integrated Italy in an international setting leading to fast export-led economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, the focus on export-led economic growth became a problem and impediment in the decades after that. Export-led growth favoured the consolidation of a productive system centred around small and medium-sized manufacturing firms, many of which are concentrated in Italy's north. Such firms needed low labour costs, cheap natural resources and energy to survive in an increasingly competitive international setting. Social cohesion and strong domestic consumption, in a setting of relatively low wages, was supported and indeed guaranteed by generous public expenditures. After the oil crisis of the 1970s up until the beginning of the 1990s, Italy was able to remain internationally competitive through the regular devaluation of the Italian lira. Today, due to Italy's Euro membership, this kind of adjustment is no longer possible. At the end of the 1980s, the converging path towards other European countries stopped. The burden of a rising public debt, the distorted composition of public expenditure, the decline of the country's manufacturing sector and insufficient investments into research and development had a negative and lasting impact on the country's competitiveness. But also failures coming from the institutional and political setting, the lack of a good ruling class, the inefficiency of the public administration and family ties, added to what is referred to as Italy "lost opportunities". A ruling class above all oriented at short-term profits instead of a long-term commitments and gains, was unable and unwilling to adopt the needed structural reforms. In order to restore Italian economic growth not only new and effective monetary and fiscal policies, but also and above all changes to Italy's administrative and industrial policies in order to reduce the various kinds of dualism are needed: dualism between the country's north and south, between industries using and not using advanced technology, between regular and temporary workers, between big and medium-small firms, between relatively protected old and not protected young workers. Reducing the above-mentioned dualism is imperative to promote investments in research, infrastructure and human capital and to reduce the dependence on energy imports, the youth unemployment rate and the increasingly growing inner-Italian inequalities and poverty. Adapted from the source document.
The purpose of the paper is to explain the process of policy change that occurred within the IMF during the 1990s in the area of capital account liberalization. Specifically, the paper compares the policies pursued in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis (1994-95) with the policies pursued after the Asian crisis (1997-98) supporting a constructivist political economy explanation of policy change. Showing the influence of economic ideas on the policies pursued by the IMF, the argument is that the governance of the international financial regime has shifted from a system of centralized cooperation to a system decentralized cooperation. Whereas the former revolved around the role of an intergovernmental organization such as the IMF, the latter builds upon the cooperation of states & non-state actors within the framework of a public-private partnership. Adapted from the source document.
This article analyses the most important innovations concerning public employment introduced in Italy during the '90s. It distinguishes different timings to administrative reforms: "the first cycle" (1992/1997) & "the second cycle" (1997/2001). Both of them are oriented to control public expenditure & to compensate -- by the complete bargaining of public service terms -- trade unions of public sector for the cuttings produced, & to reform top civil servants. On this aspect, the article shows how neo-corporative practices substituted parliamentary practices. Cooperation & negotiations between the central government & interest groups (especially trade unions) led to social agreements which became the basis of public employment reform. However, administrative reforms in Italy have been also the result of both external & domestic pressures: on the one hand, the financial constraints produced by the process of European integration (Maastricht Treaty), to which the Italian government had to adjust; on the other hand, the deep crisis of the Italian political system. The fall of party government led to more direct relations between executive & interest groups & to practices of majoritarian politics which pushed for innovative reforms. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.
