Giacomo Costa

This paper is a discussion of a new book by Andrea Boitani entitled Le illusioni del liberismo. “Liberismo”, in the present day, is more or less synonymous with the American “neo-liberalism”...

Del Monte’s book deals with the convergence among different and heterogeneous areas of a single country. He has adopted a comparative approach: the two less developed areas are the two Souths, Italy, and the USA. Its purpose is to explain the fact that the famous convergence thesis of neo-classical growth theory holds for the American South but not for the Mezzogiorno. In a first approximation, the answer lies in the fact that growth in the South of the USA and the Mezzogiorno followed two different patterns...

This paper is a revisitation of Giacomo Vaciago’s ‘‘A soul for Europe’’. Perhaps his main theses are; (i) the incompleteness of the Monetary Union: (ii) the inadequacy of the official diagnosis of the 2009-2012 financial and economic crisis; (iii) the persistent lack of a common fiscal policy; (iv) the necessity to take up the ‘‘social market economy’’ if the European Union is to have a soul...

In one of his earlier articles, Giancarlo Mazzocchi argued that the Paraguay Reductions could not be considered communist since they showed an evolution towards more independent work on plots entrusted to individual families. But he did not give any evidence of this surmised evolution. Indeed, the historian Eberhard Gothein offered a compelling reason why this could not happen. Work on public and private plots had to be monitored, and it was almost impossible to monitor work performed on private plots. The Reductions can be seen as arising from an implicit contract whereby the Guarany tribes yielded sovereignty to the Jesuit leaders, in exchange for (i) safety from the Spanish colonists and (ii) subsistence. Thus subsistence for the Guaranis become a basic, public task of the Reductions. Thus considered, the «Guarany republics» do qualify as communistic. That education was also carried out publicly, thus engendering an «ethical state», is another concurrent consideration.