Institutions and Agrarian Development: Fiscal Policies and Statistical Enquiries

The essay analyzes some elements of the fiscal policy of the Habsburg Empire, focusing on the Lombardy-Venetia Kingdom. In particular, the essay considers cadastre reform and related statistical surveys. The historical investigation has two main references to economic theory: an institutionalist approach, which values the interaction between rules and the functioning of the market; on the other hand, the public finance theory for the effects of taxation and the relationship between direct and indirect taxation. From these conceptual approaches, according to the historical methodological, the reconstruction of facts and related structures leads to the definition of a series of results. The first result concerns the introduction of taxation that supports investment in agriculture to increase productivity. In particular, the essay, consolidating international studies and publications by the authors, reconstructs how during the nineteenth century, the government of Vienna applied a flat tax that rewarded not annuity but the propensity to invest. Secondly, the Lombardy-Venetia Kingdom experiments with the application of a tax reform for the largest asset to initiate a modernization of civil administration and a new institutional system, centered on the relationship between the center and the periphery. Finally, the research highlights how the use of quantitative surveys and the goal of a general census, corresponds to the objective of setting fiscal policy based on a knowledge of the economic and social system. The analytical study of historical sources provides a macroeconomic report of pre-unification Lombardy and Veneto and, at the same time, the operating methods of nineteenth-century public administration It appears at a publisher and series well reputed in the field of economic history.