The power sharing arrangement that the fascist had in the Italian governments in the 1920s helped to prepare some of its members to handle parts of the economy well when the global depression hit. The investment in what we call "infrastructure" was an appropriate public use of money. The modernization of healthcare in the 1930s put many women through medical schools so they could staff the village and town clinics built as part of the public works program. These useful public works and the hydroelectric plants created to power the "re-birth" of the Roman Empire under Mussolini and his fascist technocrats planned to build and rule. The move towards autarky in the 1930s was a wasteful and foolish plan to be self-sufficient in a way that Italy never was during the actual era of the Roman Empire. So while the public health and the infrastructure spending was appropriate and helpful to Italian society, war and autarky were economically disastrous distortions of a nationalist economic system. The disaster that was the "struggle for wheat" and the "struggle for iron" and entry into war on the side of Germany sank the Italian economy.
