Costanza Costantino

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Costanza Costantino
Born	1913 Turin, Italy
19921992
💼 Occupation

Costanza Costantino (1913–1992) was an Italian economist who worked on long-term economic fluctuations and on the relationship between taxation and the business cycle. Excluded from the University of Turin in 1938 under the Fascist racial laws, she returned after the Second World War and became professor of public finance and financial law there in 1967, and later of transport economics.

Early life and education

Costanza Costantino was born in Turin in 1913. She earned her degree in economics and commerce at the University of Turin with a thesis on long-term economic fluctuations, in which she argued for a dynamic approach to economic analysis based on historical study and comparison.

Long waves

After further study of economic history in 1935 and 1936, she published "Sulle fluttuazioni economiche di lunga durata" (On long-term economic fluctuations, 1939), a study of the European and American economies from 1790 to 1892. She reviewed explanations of the long waves that located their cause in the dynamics of capitalism (Kondratieff, Van Gelderen), in the supply of precious metals (Cassel, Simiand) or in the interaction of demand and supply, and proposed her own explanation, in which the interaction of demand and supply was the primary cause and gold production supplied a necessary monetary basis. In her account, periods of growth were induced by radical innovations, while periods of decline were times of intensive development in which entrepreneurs improved organization and technique to maintain their position in less favourable conditions.

Career

In 1938, Costantino was excluded from the University of Turin under the anti-Semitic racial laws, and continued her studies independently. In the early 1940s, she was teaching political economy at the Istituto Tecnico "G. Sommeiller" in Turin. She wrote on women's work, first on women's freedom to work in the context of European reconstruction (1941) and then, in "Cause e rimedi dei bassi salari femminili" (Causes and Remedies of Low Women's Wages, 1943), on the gap between men's and women's pay. In the 1943 article she rejected biological explanations of the gap, attributed it chiefly to the excess supply of women's labour, to the secondary place of women's earnings in household income and to women's lack of union organization, and proposed state-mandated associations to fix rates for women homeworkers. She concluded that equal pay was "a quaestio voluntatis", a question of will, rather than an insoluble problem.

After the war she taught public finance and financial law in the University of Turin's faculty of law, and worked with Attilio Garino Canina, director of the Finance Institute of the faculty of economics and commerce, whose biographer she later became. Her comparative studies of the sensitivity of taxation to the phases of the business cycle, including Imposte e congiuntura (Taxes and the Business Cycle, 1951) and a study of public finance in Denmark (1956), recommended using that sensitivity as an instrument of counter-cyclical policy. According to her biographer, her recommendations were largely reflected in Law no. 25 of 1951 on taxation. In the same period she worked with Professor Scotto at the University of Genoa, where in 1954 she was an assistant in the faculty of economics and commerce. In a 1954 study of the effects of a general income tax over the business cycle, she argued that, given the lag between assessment and collection, such a tax had little effect over the short Kitchin cycle but significant effects over the longer Juglar and Kondratiev cycles. A proportional tax, she concluded, did not check an expansion and delayed the trough of a downturn, whereas a progressive tax acted as a brake on inflationary expansion and moderated and shortened the downturn, so that the income tax could serve as an instrument of counter-cyclical budgetary policy.

Imposte e congiuntura

Imposte e congiuntura (Taxes and the Business Cycle, 1951), published by the University of Turin's Institute of Finance with a preface by Attilio Garino Canina, examined the cyclical sensitivity of the Italian tax system tax by tax, covering taxes on income, on property, on transfers and on consumption over the period 1920–41. For each tax, it set out the legal background and a theoretical analysis, then correlated revenue or taxable income with a business-cycle index Costantino constructed from wholesale prices, industrial production and state railway traffic. She argued that knowledge of this sensitivity should guide tax policy, since Italy had "neither an entirely liberal nor a totally state-controlled economy" and so needed a counter-cyclical policy.

A review in the Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia called it a book "of lively and topical scientific and practical interest", the first systematic study of its kind for the Italian tax system, and credited Costantino with an idea that was "central and original" compared with traditional fiscal theory: taxes as "means" of fitting the tax system into the economic equilibrium. The reviewer criticized the book's brief introduction, its failure to define the "congiuntura" it measured, the construction of its index from a simple average of three series rather than a measure of national income, and its reliance on formal correlation coefficients at the expense of deductive analysis, but concluded that its chief merit, "superior to that of many 'academic' works formally far more accomplished", was to open a wide field for further research. In 1954 the economist Cesare Brasca cited it as noteworthy among recent studies of the sensitivity of taxes to the business cycle. In 1956 a scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs allowed her to complete her research in Denmark, and she also worked on the incidence of taxation. She qualified as a university teacher of public finance and financial law (libera docenza) in February 1960.

In 1961 Roberto Tremelloni, chairman of the parliamentary committee of inquiry into restrictions on competition, asked her to report on the sugar-beet industry. Her study, published by the Chamber of Deputies in 1965, argued that protectionism and price controls had prevented both a competitive market and efficiency in the industry.

In December 1967, she was appointed to the chair of public finance and financial law in the faculty of economics and commerce at Turin, which she held until the 1969–70 academic year, when it passed to Franco Reviglio. From 1970 until 1990, she held the chair of transport economics. She followed the Italian tax reform of the early 1970s closely, publishing annual editions of a critical description of the new system from 1972, collected in 1981 as Il sistema tributario italiano. She died in 1992.

Selected works

• "Sulle fluttuazioni economiche di lunga durata". Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali (1939): 794–809.
• "Di alcuni aspetti del problema del lavoro femminile nel quadro della ricostruzione europea". Rivista di Politica Economica (1941): 677–684.
• "Cause e rimedi dei bassi salari femminili". Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 14 (3), May 1943: 152–160.
• Imposte e congiuntura. Turin: Giappichelli, 1951.
• "Piani di sviluppo e pubbliche finanze". Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 23 (2), March–April 1952: 156–170.
• "L'impôt italien sur le revenu global et sa sensibilité conjoncturelle". Public Finance (1952), no. 3: 259–278.
• "Gli effetti dell'imposta generale sul reddito durante il ciclo economico". Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 25 (2), March–April 1954: 133–160.
• "Finanze pubbliche in Danimarca". Rivista di Politica Economica (1956): 1123–1140.
• "Il settore dello zucchero". In Atti della Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sui limiti posti alla concorrenza nel campo economico, vol. 7. Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1965.
• (with M. Fanno) Elementi di scienza delle finanze. 38th ed. Turin: Lattes, 1976.
• Il sistema tributario italiano: esposizione critica. Turin: Lattes, 1981.
• Lezioni moderne di finanza pubblica. Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1990.

References

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