Francesco Saverio Nitti was an Italian economist and statesman. A member of the Italian Radical Party, Nitti served as Prime Minister of Italy between 1919 and 1920. An opponent of the fascist regime in Italy, he opposed any kind of dictatorship throughout his career. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia in "Theories of Overpopulation", Nitti was also a staunch critic of English economist Thomas Robert Malthus and his Principle of Population; Nitti wrote Population and the Social System (1894). He was an important meridionalist and studied the origins of Southern Italian problems that arose after Italian unification.