In 2013 Italians will work an average of 162 days just to pay taxes, duties and contributions. It is the new all-time high: in 1990 we were at 139, in 2000 at 150. Today the European average is 130 days, 24% less than in our country. This was revealed by a study conducted by Confcommercio with the Europe Research Center and presented today during the association's assembly.
“A tightening that attacks an already declining income pool – reads the research –, thus contributing both to compress aggregate demand and to discourage the supply of labour. The complexity of the withdrawal system constitutes a further penalizing factor. Each Italian company devotes the equivalent of 269 hours of work a year to tax compliance, double that of France, 60% more than Spain, 30% more than Germany, 85 hours more than the average of EU countries and Efta. Italian SMEs also bear an annual burden of 10 billion for tax obligations (administrative, relations with offices, bookkeeping, payments), almost 50% more than the average for EU countries".
CONSUMPTION: SERIOUS CONTRACTION EVER
Household consumption, “in 2009 still capable of countering the effects of the Great World Recession, is now experiencing a drop in size never before recorded in the almost 70 years of life of the Italian Republic – continues the study -. We are witnessing the disintegration of those factors that in the past helped stabilize the cycle of our economy. Investments in construction, whose trends have often compensated for the cyclical decline of the other components of aggregate demand, will record the sixth consecutive reduction at the end of the year; despite the fact that the manufacturing sector is engaged in an effort to expand on world markets, industrial production fell by more than 4% in the first quarter and showed no signs of recovery in the April-May two-month period”.
INCOME -8,7% SINCE 2008
Furthermore, according to Confcommercio, "in real terms income has been in an uninterrupted decline since 2008, with a cumulative contraction of 8,7% and an overall loss of 86 billion euro". Each family saw its purchasing power drop on average by 3.400 euros and "even if it were possible to return to the pre-crisis growth dynamics, it would still be necessary to wait until 2036 to recover the lost purchasing power".
In this way, Italy is increasingly moving away “from the ranks of the major economies. In the crisis, Italian per capita income fell by 11 points compared to Germany, by five points compared to France, by four points compared to Japan and the United States”.
