La disoccupazione in Italia fra le due guerre mondiali

Abstract

At the end of the 1920s the reduction of unemployment represented one of the goal of the fascist regime. To achieve this goal the state should have produced a reliable statistical information, and it should have dealt also with the placement, the execution of public works, the reclamation and especially the battle for ruralization. The target was not achieved: despite the proclamations and the announcements, until the mid-1930s the fascist economic policy did not improve neither the workers’ conditions nor the levels of employment. As shown by official data, unemployment regularly increased between 1925 and 1933. This statistical information is not completely reliable, as confirmed by a debate started since then, but the official data could not have hidden the real growth of the number of unemployed. Several facts indicate a possible attitude of the regime – and of its scholars – to hide or underestimate the existence of imbalances in the labour market. Fascism planned a rigid control of the labour market in order to reduce the conflicts arising from a chronic excess of labour supply. Between the two wars the emigration flows decreased, due both to the restrictions imposed by the United States and to the fascist population policy. The 1929 crisis, then, aggravated the situation of the labour market. The ruralist myth and the anti-urbanist rhetoric aimed to mask unemployment. Between the two wars the corporative themes influenced the theoretical debate, which did not offer adequate answers to the phenomenon of mass unemployment. Italian economists took little account of the new theoretical suggestions from Keynes’ General Theory. Many demographers also supported the compatibility between the demographic policies of the regime and its action to combat unemployment.