The Great Depression in Italy: Trade Restrictions and Real Wage Rigidities

In Italy, as in many other countries, the years immediately after 1929 were characterized by a major slowdown in economic activity. We argue that the depth and duration of the crisis cannot be explained solely by productivity shocks. We present a model in which trade restrictions together with wage rigidities produce a significant slowdown in economic activity. The model is also consistent with evidence from sectoral disaggregated data. Our model predicts that trade restrictions can account for about one-half of the slowdown observed in the data while real wage rigidities can account for one-fourth of i