As a result of the recession, in the four years from mid-2008 to mid-2012, the disposable income of Italian households, valued net of inflation, fell by nine percentage points. In real terms, the purchasing power of Italians is equal to what it was in the middle of the year 1.039. We have gone back twelve years. In addition to the deflated values, nominal incomes also fall. Multiplying the Istat figure for the second quarter by four, we obtain that the annual value of the disposable income of Italian families, gross of inflation, is now equal to 1.069 billion euros. Four years ago, at the beginning of the recession, the same value was equal to 2008 billion. Thirty billion are missing. Badly counted, dividing by the sixty million residents, the per capita disposable income is now 500 euros lower than in XNUMX, three percent less on an average annual value of around seventeen thousand euros.
In the economic history of united Italy it is difficult to find a period of such an intense and protracted fall in the income of Italians. Taking the real value of per capita GDP as an indicator, the decline produced by the succession between the two recessions that began in 2008 and 2011 largely exceeds the contractions of the 1939s and 1945s. However, it remains lower than the fall that occurred during the Second World War, when real per capita GDP practically halved in the six years between XNUMX and XNUMX.
Nowadays, savings above all mitigate the economic and social repercussions of the severe recession. Not so much the new savings, difficult to form in such difficult times, as the savings accumulated by past generations. It is the wealth of Italian families that today, more than any other resource, plays the role of an essential economic and social shock absorber.
In the first quarter of 2012, the financial wealth of Italian households amounted to 3.555 billion euros. Net of debts which at the same date amounted to 832 billion, the net wealth of Italians is around 2,7 trillion euros. Compared to four years ago there is a drop that exceeds two hundred billion euros and is close to eight per cent of the total. Nonetheless, despite the reductions due to the recessions and the crisis, the financial wealth available to Italian households remains significantly higher than in other European countries. Net financial wealth - therefore, financial debts and excluding the real estate component - is worth 2,4 times the disposable income of households in Italy against only 1,1 times in Spain and 1,8 times in Germany, 2 times in France and 1,9 times times the euro area average.
Savings and wealth are essential resources for building a bridge between today's difficulties and future recovery. Exactly twenty years ago, in his speech on the occasion of World Savings Day in 1992, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi affirmed that "the choice to save (...) represents the drive to look beyond the present, to preconstitute, not only for oneself, but for their own children, for future generations, for civil society, conditions of security". Today, pre-establishing conditions of security for the economy and society means above all actively contributing to the return of growth.
The priority of growth, without which there can be no real stability, is a tension to which new savings and forms of investment of wealth accumulated in the past increasingly turn. Opening his speech for the celebration of World Savings Day 2012 in recent days, the Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco argued that savings are a fundamental raw material for the balanced development of a country as "it allows to finance investments without resulting imbalances in external accounts”. Rebuilding the links between household savings and wealth and productive investments is a crucial challenge today. The gross fixed investments of companies are in fact the component of the GDP that accuses
The priority of growth, without which there can be no real stability, is a tension to which new savings and forms of investment of wealth accumulated in the past increasingly turn. Opening his speech for the celebration of World Savings Day 2012 in recent days, the Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco argued that savings are a fundamental raw material for the balanced development of a country as "it allows to finance investments without resulting imbalances in external accounts”. Rebuilding the links between household savings and wealth and productive investments is a crucial challenge today. In fact, the gross fixed investments of companies are the component of GDP that suffers the sharpest fall since 2008.
The revival of investments it is a necessary condition for the recovery of productivity and competitiveness. Relaunching investments also involves a greater and more direct involvement of household wealth in supporting that segment of Italian companies capable of innovating and growing on world markets. In the first quarter of this year, the portion invested in listed shares of the 3.555 billion euro of Italian household wealth amounted to just 63 billion, less than two per cent. Maybe it's a little bit.
