Università Roma Tre

The themes that will be studied during the course will be based around the following thematic nuclei: the establishment and the development of central banks; the development of public finance and the rise of the stock exchange markets; the role of the banks in the process of industrialisation. In this context, the cases of England, Germany, France, United Staes, Italy will be examined in a comparative approach. A special focus will be on the understanding of the Italian case study and to the evolution of the relationship between banks and industry from the period of Italian Unification. In this context, particular attention is devoted to the events leading to the emergence of the Bank of Italy as a unique central bank institution. Another central theme is the advent and the transformation of the role of the universal banks from the end of the nineteenth century until the birth of the “entrepreneurial State”, as a result of the foundation of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI); the emergence of public companies and the more recent series of privatisations in 1990s.
Another central topic of the course is the evolution of the international monetary system between the 19th and 20th centuries. The issues dealt within this context are: the gold standard (1870 – 1914) the gold excgange standard and the decentralization and financial instability in the interwars years; the Crisis of the ‘29 and the Great depression of the 1930’s; the Bretton Woods system (1944-1971); the period of floating exchange rates, following the end of the Bretton Woods system; the growth of theinflation and the growth in public spending; the birth of the European Monetary System, and the origin of the Economic and Monetary Union.

L. Neal, A Concise History of International Finance. From Babylon to Bernanke, CUP, 2015;
V. Tanzi, Government versus Markets. The Changing Economic Role of the State, CUP, 2014;
F. Amatori, R. Millward, P.A. Toninelli (eds.), Reappraising State-Owned Enterprise, Routledge, 2011.