Surely Berlusconi, after having obtained the trust of the Chamber by thwarting the trap of the opposition, will have immediately set to work on the development decree. And in this context he must have requested the reports presented at the conference organized by the Bank of Italy on our economy in the 150 years since the unification of the country. In fact, from there it is possible to draw useful indications on what needs to be done today to resume the path of development abandoned for twenty years. It is not only the historians and economists gathered by the Bank of Italy who say that the problem is dramatically urgent, but the thousands of young people who see every opportunity for work and development slip away.
And the Governor Mario Draghi from Paris gave them ample satisfaction by stating that "today's twenty-somethings are completely right because the society that their fathers and grandfathers are leaving is a stagnant society that is unable to satisfy their legitimate aspirations.” Two days ago Draghi himself asked politicians to find the courage to break down the corporate barriers that prevent the reforms necessary to restore dynamism to our economy.
This morning Fabrizio Saccomanni, general manager of the Bank of Italy and who would be Draghi's natural successor if absurd political alchemies hadn't intervened, summarized the two days of debate at the Conference, drawing clear and useful indications for the present time.
In the first place, Saccomanni recalled that the history of the unification of Italy was also a success story from an economic point of view. In the first 130 years a great industrial revolution took place, income differences diminished both with the other advanced countries and within the regions of the South. Then we stopped. Our ancient defects have added to modern imbalances for which we have no longer been able to compete on the global market. This derives from an insufficient preparation of human capital due both to the qualitative deterioration of our education and, as Saccomannni says, and because there has been insufficient attention to rewarding merit. Firms are too small and therefore not in capable of planning an adequate expansion on world markets and therefore of offering qualified jobs for graduates or graduates. The bureaucratic-administrative system is baroque and inefficient, moreover based on a culture concentrated on formal compliance with result. Finally, the collapse of the state budget forces the country to adopt a heavy tax regime while many resources are wasted in a thousand unproductive streams.
We must start from this last point, says Saccomanni, recalling that in our history there are various examples of remediation carried out in a resolute and credible manner which have been crowned with success. Democratic Italy - recalls the general director of the Bank of Italy - has always honored its debts while the fascist regime in 26 imposed a forced consolidation of the short-term debt.
The choices we face are not easy, but no worse than those we have made at other times in our history. "The Italians, concludes Saccomanni taking up the report of the historian Toniolo, have in their DNA the ability to react positively in moments of difficulty." It will be up to Berlusconi to meditate on this lesson from history both to pass a "revolutionary" pro-development decree and to make an institutionally correct choice for the top head of the Bank of Italy.
