Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the historiographical debate surrounding the forms of Italian economic development between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, from the perspective of the European Investment Bank (EIB). Using unpublished documentation from the Bank’s archives in Luxembourg, this study retraces the ways in which national authorities attempted to relocate the problem of the «Mezzogiorno» from the US financial context to the Common Market. This process was not without some basic contradictions, such as the constraint placed by reasons of European monetary stability and the fear of «inflationary contagions» as well as the relationship between productivity and employment. EIB’s credit policy had to take these elements into account.