Shaping the Italian Constitution. Economists' Contribution on Public Finance and Taxation

The chapter will examine the activity and the elaborations of the Finance Committee of the Economic Commission of the Ministero per la Costituente. This group produced a Report, later offered to the Constituent Assembly, which treated the different aspects of public expenditure and among them the structure of taxation; the typologies of taxes; the balance between direct and indirect taxation; the fiscal and the not fiscal goals of taxation; the taxation on companies; the succession tax. Stressing a wide range of arguments, they offered relevant technical contributions and, at the same time, a strong theoretical basis dealing with the nature of taxation that permeates the spirit of the Constitution. The debate deals in particular with the causes of the fiscal imposition, the necessity that taxes have a basis in ethical norms, underlining the connection with the common weal and helping in this way to overcome the idea of taxes’ hatefulness. Showing the reception of the Finance Committee’s proposals by the Constituent Assembly, the chapter underline the origins, the theoretical basis and overall the relevance of the positions of the Economists that worked in that commission, so contributing fundamentally to the final text of the Italian Constitution and, by this way, to shape the structure of the financial part of it