Istituto di Economia Internazionale - The Elusive Search for Harmony between the Role of the State and that of the Market

Recent Articles

Read more about our latest published articles.

Review’s Archive

Corresponding Author:
Vito Tanzi, International Institute of Public Finance, Munich, Germany

The Elusive Search for Harmony between the Role of the State and that of the Market

Volume 75 - Issue 4 - Papers in memoriam of Amedeo Amato, November 2022
(pp. 623-642)
JEL classification: B10; B20; D60; H10; I30; P10
Keywords: Laissez Faire; Use of Economic Resources; Income Distribution; Harmony; Ideological Changes

Abstract

Since the creation of modern states, states that were democratic and used market economies, there has been the question of what should be the economic role of governments. During the many years when the prevailing ideology was “laissez faire”, the answer was that governments had very few basic responsibilities and available economic resourced should be directed exclusively toward increasing output, without any attention to the distribution of income. After the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, views started to change and welfare states that paid attention to income distribution and to the well being of all the populations came into existence. After the decade off the 1970s there was a tentative return of policies to more laissez faire. The result was uneven income distributions in many countries. The paper stresses the difficulty in reaching harmony between the role of the state and that of the market.

Read the full article

Download the article in PDF format to read and print.

Bibliography

Akerlof, G.A. (1970), “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488-500.

Ferrara, F. (various years), Opere Complete. Dieci Volumi. (Sotto gli Auspici dell’Associazione Bancaria Italiana e della Banca D’Italia).

Fogel, R.W. (2000), The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Keynes, J.M. (1926), The End of Laissez Faire, Hogarth Press: London.

Le Encicliche Sociali (1999), Dalla Rerum Novarum alla Centesimus Annus, Paoline Editoriali Libri.

Leroy-Beaulieu, P. (1888), Traité de la Science des Finances, Guillaumin: Paris.

Loria, A. (1903), Il Movimento Operaio, Remo Sandron Editore: Milano, Palermo, Napoli.

Piketty, T. (2002), Disuguaglianza. La visione economica, Università Bocconi Editore.

Porter, G. (1992), The Rise of Big Business, 1850-1920, Harlan Davidson Inc.: Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Sinn, H-W. (2010), Casino Capitalism: How the Financial Crisis Came about and what Needs to be Done now, Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Sandel, M.J. (2012), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

Tanzi, V. (2011), Government Versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Tanzi, V. (2013), Dollars, Euros, and Debt: How we got into the Fiscal Crisis and how we get out of it, Palgrave Macmillan: London.

Tanzi, V. (2016), “Pleasant Dreams or Nightmares in the Public Debt Scenarios?”, Ifo Schnelldienst, 69(9), 27-35.

Tanzi, V. (2018a), Termite of the State: How Complexity Leads to Inequality, Cambridge University Press: New York.

Tanzi, V. (2018b), The Ecology of Tax Systems, Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA/USA.

Tanzi, V. (2019), The Irresistible Attraction of Public Debt, in: R. Wagner (Ed.), “James M. Buchanan. A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy”, Palgrave Macmillan: London.

Tanzi, V. and L. Schuknecht (2000), Public Spending in the 20^th Century: A Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Woodward, Sir Llewellyn F.B.A. [1938] 1962, The Age of Reform 1815-1870, Second Edition, Clarendon Press: Oxford.

Recent Articles

Review’s Archive

The Elusive Search for Harmony between the Role of the State and that of the Market

Abstract

Read the full article

Bibliography

Register your account

Authors’ login

Institute for International Economics of the Genoa Chamber of Commerce

Institute for International Economics
of the Genoa Chamber of Commerce