ABSTRACT
Other Western European countries may provide models of decline, adaptation or renewal; Italy is often seen as merely a particular case, an oddity, the question-mark at the end of the Western European sentence. Even Italy’s successes, such as the economic growth of the immediate post-war period, are seen in these terms. A miracle, after all, is not repeatable to order and is essentially inexplicable. But of course that period of sustained economic development known as ‘the Italian miracle’ is certainly explicable in terms of the conditions and policies of the time - a large reservoir of cheap mobile labour, a strong stable currency, encouragement to political and /economic integration in Western Europe, a dynamic and expanding public sector, among other factors. This pattern of economic development provides, for many within the Christian Democratic Party at least, the model to which policy in the eighties should attempt to steer Italy. But one of the major difficulties in understanding policy responses to the crises of the seventies and the eighties is that there is no consensus among Italian policy-makers about ‘the Italian model’ or, to put it less obliquely, about what constitutes success.
