Azienda, equilibri e dinamica economica: Gino Zappa e gli «Erotemi» di Maffeo Pantaleoni (Firm, equilibrium and dynamic economics: Gino Zappa and the last essays of Maffeo Pantaleoni)

In the first decades of the xx century, Pantaleoni was the leading scholar of the Italian economic school. His dialectics with V. Pareto, especially on features and foundations of such a dynamic approach that may overlook the static approach based on equilibrium, had a great and valuable role in educating young economists of that time like Del Vecchio and Fanno. According to Pantaleoni, both the accounting question of overheads allocation and the role of the organised economic activity generated by the firm are fundamental to understand endogenous forces leading to a dynamic, evolutionary economy. This interpretation of the last Pantaleoni is meaningful for framing and explaining the original development accomplished by another neglected applied economist and accounting theorist of those decades: Gino Zappa. Starting from Pantaleoni’s notions of «connection of prices» and «economic complex», related to his dynamic approach, Zappa developed his own dynamic approach to the firm, understood as a dynamic system and a lasting, evolutionary whole. This paper proves the theoretical relationship between Pantaleoni and Zappa by a comprehensive analysis of references and quotations made by Zappa himself to works and articles of Pantaleoni. This analysis further stresses some major points that distinguish Zappa from his declared master and lead him to his own original way to the economics of the firm. Zappa refuses the individualist approach based on equilibrium and adopts a holistic approach based on dynamic system. In this way, Zappa abandons the marginalist theory of distribution, essentially static, and develops an unitary, organic, dynamic theory of the income to the firm, a special viewpoint that, at that time, has relevant analogies with F. Perroux. From this perspective, the accounting system becomes the mode and the language that, with limitations, can hold on and represent the firm as an «actual economic co-ordination».