A Macroeconomia do Fascismo de Mussolini na Grande Depressão

Trecho do artigo autorado por Claire Giordano, Gustavo Piga e Giovanni Trovato ITALY’S INDUSTRIAL GREAT DEPRESSION: FASCIST PRICE AND WAGE POLICIES, publicado no Macroeconomic Dynamics: "the Italian government encouraged the creation of cartels in order to rationalize production and the corresponding costs and to keep industrial revenues as high as possible via price increases, on the other, it imposed a reduction in production costs by dictatorially lowering labor expenses.35 What happened to industrial real wages after 1929, again as a result of government intervention on both prices and wages? Given the fixed target, nominal wages declined similarly to consumer prices. However, as seen in Section 3.1, the decline in wholesale prices was more pronounced than that in consumer prices. The different degree of reduction of the two price index series thus had a diverging effect on real wages. Figure 3 plots the two detrended industrial real wage series in the period 1929–1936. The own product real wage, i.e., the real wage deflated by the wholesale price index, grew by around 40% until 1934, with a consequent increase of labor costs for firms. Real wages deflated by the consumption price index instead remained more or less constant, thereby displaying the lack of a corresponding increase in workers’ purchasing power and the success of the government’s wage-targeting policy. The rise in real wages and thus of labor costs was accompanied by a significant fall in employment"