Summary - TST 40

TRANSPORTES, SERVICIOS Y TELECOMUNICACIONES


TST 40

Giulio Fenicia

Private vices vs public virtues: taxation and meat market in Taranto between 19th and 20th centuries

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Key Words: Taranto, Local finance, Excise duty, Annona (Food supply), Meat.


[ Abstract ]

This essay aims at investigating the conflicting relationship between the governance guidelines of a Southern municipal administration, which is dutifully attentive to meeting the primary needs for subsistence of the weakest segments of its population, but which is also forced to act within an unbalanced and constraining tax and budgetary structure, and the antithetical interests of profit-minded local economic operators. The outcome of such contraposition is the continuous, necessarily ever-evolving search for balance, whose functioning mechanisms are the main object of this investigation. The specific case study, investigated in its various aspects, is that of the meat market in the town of Taranto which, despite its uniqueness, represents well the social and economic dynamics of a Southern community projected into the new and uncertain post-unitary dimension.