Who better than Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a natural example of symbiosis between public and private (80% of the capital is owned by the Ministry of the Economy and 20% private), could have played a key role in the so-called PPPs, public-private partnerships, or those unconventional economic policies necessary in times of crisis, when the State is forced to turn off the taps and to ally with the business world? Giovanni Gorno Tempini, a guest at Bocconi at the first annual conference of the Mp3 Observatory, explained it: "For a century and a half the Cassa has dealt with the investments of the Public Administration in infrastructures, now it deals with infrastructures in general and above all with support to the economy through access to credit and risk capital for all companies, and through real capital management activities through the Italian Investment Funds and the Italian Strategic Fund”.
The role, one might say, of a modern "public" bank, not like those that in the 70s, when Italy was growing more than the USA and Europe (3,1% against 2,2 and 2,6 according to the IMF data), they constituted more than 75% of the banking landscape (now only 10%) and made the State a major provider of capital for growth, dramatically increasing public debt. "After Maastricht and with the advent of the euro, and the consequent change in the banking system - he explained again at Bocconi Andrea Montanino, Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund -, the State is less and less a provider, because it can no longer afford it, and more and more a promoter of a convergence between public and private, in which the contribution of capital comes from the private world”.
This alternative tool, which will be necessary for at least another 20 years, i.e. until after 2030, when according to IMF calculations the gap between the public debt line and that of GDP will finally be closed in Italy, coincides perfectly with the new role of the Cdp: “Once – Gorno Tempini explains again – the central or local public bodies knocked on the Cdp and asked for a mortgage, of which the Cdp evaluated the feasibility and then disbursed the money. Since I've been at the top of the Cassa, ie for 4 years, the disbursement of capital has decreased by 50% every year”.
No rain of money, therefore, but a new economic policy based on strategic investments by the public, with the economic partnership of the private world. That, in the synthesis that emerges from the Bocconi conference, which has not been held for decades, "when the State - explains Montanino of the IMF - yes, it increased public spending to try to support growth, but it did it the wrong way by favoring current expenditure rather than investment, especially in infrastructure”. And so, while the Italian public debt/GDP ratio rose from 38% in 1970 to over 100% in the 90s, in Italy, to cite a couple of examples, the road network was only increased by 7%. in front of 61% of France and 171% of Spain, and we are last among the main European competitors for km of high-speed rail, with less than 700 km of network covered.
The public-private partnership is therefore urgent and necessary but should not be abused, as in the not very virtuous case of Portugal, the European country that has made the most use of it, above all for roads and investments in health care, but which found itself with many operations that exploded in its hands due to the excessive amount of capital invested in a short time and with little attention to the risks. The virtuous example is instead once again Germany, thanks to KfW, acronym Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Reconstruction Bank), the famous public bank founded after the war at the behest of the US, in support of the Marshall Plan. The KfW currently works just like our Cdp: 80% of the capital is held by the federal government while the remaining 20% is held by the Länder.
Through the KfW, the German government channels a whole series of transactions that elsewhere would appear in the state accounts for huge sums: last year the assets of the Frankfurt-based institute nearly reached 500 billion euros, more than double that at the beginning of the past decade, also due to the transfer under its umbrella of many activities previously under the responsibility of the public administration, or of new activities, such as those relating to environmental protection.
