Viti de Marco, Antonio de
Viti de Marco, Antonio de
Antonio De Viti de Marco was born in 1858 at Casamassella, near Lecce, in Apulia, and died in Rome in 1943. After holding positions as professor of public finance in Camerino, Macerata, and Pavia, he became a professor at the University of Rome in 1887. He taught at Rome until 1931, when with 11 other professors he resigned from his chair, refusing to take an oath endorsing the education of Italian youth according to the fascist program. In his letter of resignation he declared that the freedom of thought and speech necessary to a university professor is fundamentally undermined by sworn loyalty to a political party. Three years later he resigned from the ancient Accade-mia dei Lincei for the same reasons; he also refused Mussolini’s offer to make him a senator. He publicly thanked Ernesto Rossi for helping him with the last edition of his Principles, although Rossi had just been condemned by the fascist Peoples Court as a member of the organization Giustizia e Libertá.
From 1908 to 1921 De Viti was in parliament as a member of the Radical party and was a strong opponent of the protectionist policy of the industrial north. He was active throughout his life in the interest of the Mezzogiorno, the much neglected south of Italy. In addition to his academic, scholarly, and political activities he devoted himself successfully to the administration and cultivation of his large landholdings in Apulia. Because of this combination of interests and activities, his studies of public finance were always very realistic, although they were also highly abstract and rigorous.
De Viti’s first work, Moneta e prezzi (1885), is a theoretical and statistical investigation of the quantity theory of money, of the international distribution of precious metals, and of the structure of interest rate differentials and their effect on lending operations. He used the quantity theory to develop a monetary theory of business cycles and measured the severity of a crisis by the loss of social capital. His fundamental work, II carattere teorico dell’ economia ftnanziaria, appeared in 1888. It was followed by other writings, culminating in I primi principii dell’ economia fmanziaria (see 1923a), This work was translated into German, English, and Spanish and had an introduction by Luigi Einaudi, one of De Viti’s greatest admirers. In addition De Viti wrote about the contributions to economics of Serra, Pantaleoni, and A. Messe-daglia and in 1898 published a treatise on the function of banks. His political writings were collected under the title Un trentennio di lotte politiche (1894-1922); they deal mostly with his opposition to protectionism, which he believed harmful to the interests of the agricultural south (1929). His opposition was carried on largely through the Anti-protectionist League, which he had founded.
De Viti distinguished between two fundamentally different forms of organization of the state— the monopolistic state and the cooperative state— and explored their implications for taxation and public finance. In the monopolistic state, taxes are least burdensome to the privileged, feudal classes, and more power is wielded by the state itself than by private monopolies (which are checked or weakened by substitution, smuggling, and so forth); in the cooperative state, all citizens are producers and consumers of public services, and private goods are transformed into public goods. The elaboration of this distinction led De Viti to an analysis of the demand for public goods and to the recognition that not all taxes are a burden but instead can even constitute a decrease in costs, the state being able to provide some public goods more cheaply than private individuals can.
De Vitfs analysis of the incidence of taxation anticipated many later developments. He showed that the “collective” wants of the community, satisfied by public goods, are not felt by any one person and are thus different from the “general” wants, which are merely wants common to many individuals. His analysis of the distribution of taxes—by comparing social benefits and individual costs and advantages—was based on the use of the principle of marginal utility. He also analyzed profoundly the problem of the limits of the public debt and showed how an “automatic amortization” of a debt (originally created by credit operations) occurs when the debt is matched by new savings. De Viti thus destroyed the idea, strongly held since Adam Smith, that states cannot carry increasing debts; owing to new savings the debts become a transitory element in the state’s budget, causing taxes to be collected from one group and paid to another —the savers.
De Viti favored proportional taxation, which he believed comes closest to producing a just distribution of the burden of taxation. He maintained this view in spite of his adherence to the principles of marginal utility.
The flourishing of the study of public finance in Italy owed a great deal to De Viti; according to Einaudi, probably De Viti’s most eminent student, anyone confronted with a question of public finance asks himself first of all, What does De Viti think about it? And elsewhere too De Viti’s work contributed a great deal toward the establishment of a science of public finance.
Oskar Morgenstern
[Directly related are the entriesDebt, Public; Public expenditures; Taxation. Other relevant material may be found inMoney, article onquantity theory; and in the biography ofEinaudi.]
WORKS BY VITI DE MARCO
1885 Moneta e prezzi ossia il principio quantitative) in rapporto alia questione monetaria. Citta di Castello: Lapi.
1888 11 carattere teorico dell’ economia finanziaria. Rome: Pasqualucci.
1898 Saggi di economia e finanza. Rome: Giornale degli Economist!.
(1923a) 1950 First Principles of Public Finance. London: Cape. → First published in Italian. Originally issued in 1886-1887 as a draft of mimeographed lecture notes, then as printed lectures in 1923. The 1950 edition is based on the definitive version of the Principii published in 1934.
1923b Scienza delle finanze. Rome: Manuzio.
1925 Maffeo Pantaleoni. Giornale degli economisti e ri-vista di statistica 4th Series 65:165-177.
1927 Due commemorazioni: Angelo Messedaglia; Maffeo Pantaleoni. Rome: Sampaolesi.
1929 Un trentennio di lotte politiche (1894-1922). Rome: Collezione Meridionale Editrice.
1935 La funzione della banca: Introduzione allo studio dei problemi monetari e bancari contemporanei. Turin: Einaudi.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Black, Duncan 1939 The Incidence of Income Taxes. London: Macmillan.
Dehove, GÉrard 1946 L’oeuvre financière d’Antonio DeViti de Marco. Revue d’économie politique 56:250-291, 436-456.
Fasiani, Mauro 1932-1933 Der gegenwärtige Stand der reinen Theorie der Finanzwissenschaft in Italien. Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie 3:651-691; 4:79-107, 357-388.
Gangemi, Lello 1945 Anteguerra e dopoguerra nel pensiero di Antonio De Viti de Marco. Naples: Morano.
Papa, Antonio 1965 Ritratti critici di contemporanei: Antonio De Viti de Marco. Belfagor 20:188-209.
Rossi, Ernesto 1948 Antonio De Viti de Marco: Uomo civile. Bari: Laterza.
Stammati, Gaetano 1945 In memoria di un maestro: Antonio De Viti de Marco. Economia e commercio 1, no. 4:41-46.