The Italian income policy concertation: food for thought from the contributions of Ezio Tarantelli and Augusto Graziani

Income distribution has been a constant in the Italian economic debate, attracting considerable scholarly interest between the 1970s and the early 1990s, when it also became a political issue. Income policy concertation – to whose theoretical development Ezio Tarantelli made a significant contribution – became the cornerstone of the new approach. Nevertheless, Tarantelli’s proposals were not readily adopted, and the legislative interventions, culminating in the 1993 ‘Ciampi Pro-tocol’, can be placed in a different perspective. Not all economists agreed with this theoretical and institutional pattern. Augusto Graziani, for instance, emphasised the limits of concertation in light of a different theoretical view. This paper offers some food for thought from the contributions of Ezio Tarantelli and Augusto Graziani on income policy concertation. Despite the intention to ele-vate income policy concertation to a higher rank among economic policies in Italy, Tarantelli viewed the early 1980s agreements with scepticism, considering them insufficiently effective in curbing inflation and fearing that the country might have to resort to restrictive monetary policies. For his part, Graziani emphasised that the fundamental flaw in these initiatives lay in the theoreti-cal framework used to explain inflation, thereby underlining the limits of the Italian experience of concertation.