Sviluppo dei Conti Nazionali e pianificazione del Secondo conflitto mondiale: l'arretratezza dell'Italia (Development of national accounts and planning of the second World War: The Italy's backwardness)

The development of the System of National Accounts intervened in the second half of the ’30s in the United States and the United Kingdom. Compared to the traditional view that recognizes an essential role in economic policy after the 1929 crisis and in The General Theory by J. M. Keynes, I believe that to these factors the planning of American warfare, 1940-1945, should be added. In this essay, I discuss the role of us military planning in the development of national accounts, well before the time of Pearl Harbor. So, I provide an overview of the major works, for the most part available in the economic publications of that time. Where as in Italy carrying out a parallel with the national income estimates conducted by two public institutions, the Istituto Centrale di Statistica e l’Istituto Nazionale della Finanza Corporativa, I find the data was neither reliable nor of an historical series. On this the autarchic closure in the cultural field played a great role. Italy faced onerous initiatives in Ethiopia, Spain and then in World War II without adequate macroeconomic information. After the end of the conflict, the Bank of Italy breaks the cultural isolationism by developing cultural exchanges with the Anglo-Saxon countries and by the missions to Washington of high ranking officials to acquire information on the new national accounts