At the end of the 60s, ‘income policies’ were talked about a lot in Europe, which seemed, however, to be an instrument of aggregate economic policy to induce unions to a greater control of their demands, assuming that the pressure of nominal wage could damage investments, the growth-rate and therefore better future chances.
The assumption was simplistic. People began to distinguish an income policy ‘of firemen’ striving, as they said, for the ‘extinction’ of the hotbeds of slackness and inflation at the same time, and an income policy ‘of the architect’ striving to build an income distribution between categories and social groups, and to serve for the implementation of more qualified and identified resources allocation programmes, rather than those generically addressed at doubtful aggregations of ‘investments’ or ‘consumptions’.
For this book, Franco Archibugi and Francesco Forte have collected a series of contributions in order to analyse how the income policy could and should function in an economic planning process and to persuade the social partners that advantageous solutions for all participants in the game could rise from a rational negotiation and from optimal solutions (thus conscious of the constraints).
The book collects reflections and papers by Franco Archibugi, Vera Cao Pinna, Bruno Contini, Maurizio di Palma, Francesco Forte and Pietro Merli-Brandini.