How to adjust? Italy and Spain at the test of financial integration and crisis

The aim of this chapter is to compare the way in which Italy and Spain adjusted their domestic financial systems to the challenges brought about first by the European Single Market and Monetary Union and then by the European sovereign debt crisis. How did the process of adjustment materialize? How were the costs distributed among different domestic actors? What was the institutional outcome of this process? How similar or different have Italy and Spain become as a result of it? Is it still possible to consider them contiguous models of capitalism? We will answer these questions by testing the predictions derived from existing analyses of the Mediterranean model of capitalism.