Italy had the General Commissariat for War Production (Commissariato generale per le fabbricazioni di guerra/CoGeFaG). It had been established after the Ethiopian War and gradually expanded in size. The closest analogue to Speer was General Carlo Favagrossa. He was a Spanish Civil War veteran and Mussolini thought his wartime experience would help render Italian production more efficient. Neither CoGeFaG nor Favagossa were able to accomplish very much during the war. Some of the fault for this failure was structural. CoGeFaG was not a cabinet-level position and while it controlled the allocation of raw materials, it had little power over direct military procurement. Within the chronically disorganized fascist state it was very hard for the armed forces to coordinate their efforts. Favagossa was quite pessimistic about Italy's war economy. He warned Ciano that Italy's war economy was like "trying to take a bath with the taps blocked and the outlet open." Much of this pessimism was warranted; domestic raw material constraints and the inability to import them led to no substantial increases within weapons production. Favagossa acted much like Speer after the war, publishing a book on the war economy (Perchè perdemmo la guerra [why we lost the war]), and positioning himself as a public intellectual privy to the inner workings of the fascist state.

Japan's economic mobilization differed from both German and Italy in that it operated within the structures of the Japanese cabinet system and long-established patterns of close cooperation between industry and the imperial bureaucracy. Consequently, there was no single individual who emerged as the face of the dictatorship as in the example of Speer. The imperial state instituted control associations just prior to the Pacific War to act as intermediaries between the state and industry. These control associations were headed a chairman from private industry. This arrangement proved to be chronically inefficient as most of the chairman were concerned with the profitability of their respective cartels. The Japanese state tried to render this situation more logical and in September 1943. It amalgamated the various cabinet ministries and subordinated them to the military agencies responsible for procurement. The 1943 reorganization also absolved the chairman of control associations of their legal and fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders. Although this rationalization did lead to a gains in efficiency, it coincided with the increased effectiveness of the Allied submarine blockade. When coupled with the bombing raids of the next year rendered these efficiencies moot.

Sources

Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini's Italy Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

Harrison, Mark. The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Lewis, Paul H. Latin Fascist Elites: The Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar Regimes. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2002.

Murray, Williamson, and Allan Reed Millett. Calculations: Net Assessment and the Coming of World War II. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Yamamura, Kozo. The Economic Emergence of Modern Japan. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.