The politics of quantification: The General Confederation of Italian Industry and the cost-of-living index in the late 1920s

Abstract

Business interests can indirectly affect political decisions through the definition of statistical procedures to produce the quantitative indexes used to assess policy choices. This observatory capture takes on peculiar technocratic features in authoritarian contexts. This paper focuses on the role of the General Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria) in the construction of an official cost-of-living index at the time of the Fascist regime’s corporatist turn and the revaluation of the Italian lira in 1926. Wage cuts were determined following the price index, and official procedures to collect data on prices from workers’ outlets were adopted to dispel Italian industrialists’ concerns about the rise in the cost of production. Following the loss of archival documentation on this matter, the authors have reconstructed the events from indirect sources. The issue of cost-of-living index numbers in Italy under the Fascist regime raises concerns about the credibility of statistics and economic data under dictatorships.