Giorgio Squinzi said in an orderly manner all the things that his associate entrepreneurs wanted to hear, he exalted the role of the manufacturing company, he asked the Government for money to relaunch investments and to reduce taxes on labor and companies, he recalled the simplification of the PA, the need to implement liberalizations (but did not mention privatizations), he lambasted the banks and recalled the importance of a different and more adherent training to the needs of businesses.
However, one gets the impression that Squinzi's report to the Confindustria assembly did not bring the real evils of the Italian economy and society into clear focus, and that therefore the recipes for getting out of the crisis, albeit of common sense and took one to widely shareable, we do not have that disruptive force, that necessary charge of innovation which alone can bring our system out of the swamp in which it finds itself.
In the first place, the analysis of the real causes of the crisis into which we have plunged appears to be lacking. To say that austerity is not the right recipe is not enough to explain the reasons why, as Squinzi himself recalls, Italy's growth stopped well before the crisis exploded or the reason why the cost of work per unit of product has been rising in Italy for a good 15 years while in Germany it is falling. It is distorting to think that there are champions of austerity around in Italy (these are political propaganda formulas that the president of the industrialists could have avoided), and that now instead we need to focus on growth perhaps achieved through an expansion of public spending .
In reality, there hasn't been growth for a long time and the effects of the crisis have been much heavier in us than in other European countries, precisely because our public spending is too high and totally inefficient, and therefore our recovery should have been entrusted to a profound reform of the State in all its articulations, to a relaunch of the market which works badly in Italy and is distorted by the power of too many corporations and to a good functioning of the banking system which is still prey to absurd constraints such as those concerning People of Milan.
Secondly, the therapy proposed by Confindustria does not appear to be sufficiently centered on attacking the key to the skein that grips the Italian economy. In the report there are important references to the things to be done to change our institutional system starting with the revision of Title V of the Constitution, the reform of the Justice (but in this case he forgot to stigmatize the postponement of the reorganization of the small courts decided at the unanimously by the Parliament), to the streamlining of the procedures of the PA.
But the central problem is not touched upon: in fact, nothing is said about the need to tackle the problem of public debt reduction, and no mention is made of the shortcomings of the political system and of the parties which prefer to play around with a small postponement of the IMU, passing it off as a great victory, instead of making a serious effort to remove the real obstacles that are taking Italy out of the international context.
Just as there is a lack of truly effective indications on how to overcome the credit crunch that is suffocating businesses. Perhaps it would have been necessary to have the courage to go against the commonplace of attributing all the blame to the banks and to state clearly that we need to find a way to recapitalize them or to lighten them from the burden of non-performing loans in order to enable them to resume disbursing money to families and businesses.
Lastly, there was no stricter reminder of the responsibilities of politics which in past years has squandered the dividend of the Euro, i.e. the low interest rates and that of the low price of energy, dramatically increasing current spending, mostly patronage. And even towards the unions Squinzi appeared too soft without stigmatizing the serious delays with which an agreement was reached (still not sufficient) to expand the scope of company contracts. As far as representation is concerned, it is still being discussed, but care must be taken not to hand over veto powers to small minorities of workers whose objective is to overthrow the system and not to reform it.
Ultimately, Squinzi's report is good for normal times or with economic crises, but Italy is in a phase of extreme emergency, which can only be overcome with highly innovative measures that have a great impact on organizations and on individual citizens.
