Fascism was not a developmental dictatorship: evidence from simple tests

The economic history literature on Fascism points out that its policies were strongly oriented towards capital accumulation. In this paper we analyse capital accumulation in Italy between 1881 and 1938 to verify its stability. If these policies were successful, we should observe a discontinuity in the data generation process with respect to the previous period. However, this analysis shows that the process is quite stable over time, and possible discontinuities cannot be attributed to the economic policy of the Fascist government.