Without a precise and shared diagnosis of the country's problems, it is very difficult for anyone to be able to remedy them. The stalemate of politics is yet another confirmation that when you don't know what to do… nothing gets done.
The same "political debate" does not go beyond gossip: what Tizio said about what Caio said about what Sempronio said...
And yet, everyone knows – because they see it every day – what the problems are and therefore what the priorities would be. But being problems that characterize what unites us, no one - alone - is able to solve them.
The alarm just raised in Turin by the industrialists on 12-13 April is just the umpteenth confirmation of this. For many years, Italy has not grown and today's crisis is only partly a recession and the undesirable consequence of (more or less motivated) austerity policies. REF Ricerche has always been careful to distinguish in its analyses: economic situation and trends; short and long term; the cycle from the fundamentals. We have repeatedly specified that together with the recession – which as such will end sooner or later with a recovery – a loss of potential is underway, i.e. a lowering of the foreseeable growth path. Last time this was well explained in the REF piece (February 20, 2013) titled “Deindustrialization“. But we had already talked about it on these pages even before (see the analysis Recovery or growth? of 10 December 2012). The fact is that we talk about it for a while, but then we are unable to transform the analysis into a shared diagnosis and therefore into political action. Let's talk about something else…
A first diagnosis was presented ten years ago, in a good number of Il Mulino magazine, whose part on the decline of the Italian economy was entitled by Edmondo Berselli: An economy that doesn't work.
The clearest and most systematic position was then expressed by Mario Draghi in his first Final Considerations of 31 May 2006: twenty pages entirely and explicitly dedicated to a single objective: "Back to growth“. A position shared with the entire Research Department of the Bank of Italy which already in previous years – including with the analyzes on the decline of the Italian economy by Ignazio Visco, now Governor, had addressed those issues. Another seven years (and three governments) have passed since the Draghi diagnosis and the problem is still the same, only more serious. Failure to grow has turned into decline and then into decay (it is no longer just productivity and then GDP that are falling back, but also the quality of institutions).
Let's remember in a nutshell what we are talking about. In the words of Draghi (2006): "In Italy, since the mid-nineties ... total factor productivity has decreased, a unique case among industrialized countries." As the situation worsened further in the following years, we can say that Italy has been going backwards for twenty years now. Every day, we read it on the data that is published that day: once it's consumption, once it's employed, once it's production, and so on. But these are the many pieces of a single mosaic: in the absence of growth, it is no longer true that the new generations are better off than the previous ones. And since all this is valid on average, while we know that it is typical of phases of decline to also record an increased variance, it can happen – and we see this every day too – that there is an increasingly unequal concentration of well-being. Some suffer much more than others.
Are we really interested in guessing the day the recovery will start? Come to think of it, this is the least of the problems. The only thing we know for sure is that the country will stop going backwards some time after someone at the Quirinale and at Palazzo Chigi will have this sole priority: return to growth, in the interest of each and every one.
