Emptying boxes: Jannaccone and the Italian debate on dumping

Briefly, the experiment will consist in reworking the debate on the theory of dumping that arose in the Italian context in the wake of the concrete problems of the iron and steel industry, when this industry was subjected to the massive action of the German Stahlverband. It was a debate that took shape with considerable enthusiasm on the pages of Luigi Einaudi’s “Riforma sociale” from 1911 onwards; in our present context, one of the aims will be to highlight the main points of the analysis put forward at that time by Pasquale Jannaccone, suggesting that his opinion can be viewed as an approach - albeit still only limited, embryonic, and even somewhat underdeveloped analytically - towards a position that prefigured criticism of the Marshallian model of the perfect market and the tripartite division of production units. (To be sure, stated in such blunt terms, the risk of being charged with anachronism would perhaps be too strong). Or at the very least, Jannaccone’s opinion is symptomatic of a theoretical sense of unease when faced with the crystal-clear nature of the Marshallian model. It was an uneasiness that the Italian economist would elaborate further during the course of his cultural and scientific evolution, to the point of claiming it - without acrimony but with a barely disguised hint of pride - to be a forerunner of the famous polemic on the empty economic boxes, those very boxes that acted as the starting point (but perhaps this too is just one more historiographic myth) of the important breakthrough of twentieth-century economic reflection that was the theory of imperfect competition. Such nodes are certainly too difficult, too ambitious and too tightly interlinked to be unraveled in the brief space of a paper. Nevertheless, it is not impossible to put forward a few (very cautious and problematic) observations based on the conviction, though this too may be an illusion, that from the future one may be able to learn something about the past, in the sense of enriching the value of some hidden loop or ironing out some (false) wrinkle that was a bit too visible. The entire conception, it is well to remember, sprang from a study published in L. Einaudi’s “Riforma sociale”, which was a veritable laboratory where, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the critical and theoretical energies of Italian economists probed hypotheses and research lines that were not entirely far-fetched, with perceptive intuitions which at times were strikingly powerful, although they may not always have been formulated with the necessary apparatus of so