ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Maffeo Pantaleoni and the Public Finance. The Italian Tradition and the Public Choice
Author: BINI Piero
In the two last decades of the Nineteenth Century, in Italy, some scientific works which treated public finance as an independent object of study were published. In these works some theoretical and methodological choices turned out particularly effective: those considering the fiscal activity of the State in the light of the categories and concepts of economics as, for instance, marginal utility, exchange, prices, and so on. The awareness that the fiscal activity could be analysed as a market phenomenon was widely spreading at that time. This paper deals with the contribution Maffeo Pantaleoni gave - between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries - to various aspects of public finance, and in particular: a) the general theories of public finance; b) the theory of taxation; c) the growth of public expenditure in relation to GNP in the contemporary economies. Recently, some scholars (see, for example, R. E. Wagner 2003 and J. G. Backhaus and R. E. Wagner 2005) valued Pantaleoni’s contribution as a pioneering one in the vein of the Public Choice approach. Undoubtedly, this is a very interesting interpretation, also susceptible of significant developments. At the same time, my paper will also try to demonstrate that such an interpretation is not exclusive, because it does not completely reflect the wide-ranging methodological and theoretical framework the Italian economist employed in his public finance studies.
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