After the resignation of Commissioner Carlo Cottarelli, Renzi changes direction for the spending review and gives new impetus to the public spending review process launched by the Letta executive.
Yoram Gutgeld and Roberto Perotti should receive the baton left by the former extraordinary commissioner and the task of developing a new spending review that will convince the Renzi government. The Cottarelli dossier will remain as a starting point for the work of the new commissioners, but according to the first rumors the prime minister would like them to identify micro-measures that will affect a wider range of sectors. In fact, the original sin of Cottarelli's work had been to concentrate mainly on the pension system and on the work of the state, presenting macro-interventions for savings in these areas. Smaller measures, but which affect a greater number of items of public expenditure: this in summary is the task just undertaken by Gutgeld and Perotti.
The former, an economist from the Democratic Party, will focus his attention on 'decentralized' spending, while the professor at Milan's Bocconi University will be responsible for the work on the spending of the ministries and the costs of politics. The new spending review should concentrate the work of rationalizing public spending on the local health system, on expenditure by the Regions and on the mechanism for providing incentives to businesses. The interventions of the government should also facilitate the work of the new commissioners: on the one hand the savings that will be obtained from the cut in the investee companies and on the other from the reform of the Public Administration currently under examination by the Senate.
The ultimate goal is to arrive prepared for the next stability law. Indeed, it is precisely here that the work of Gutgeld and Perotti will allow Prime Minister Renzi to recover important resources for the new year and above all to defuse the safeguard clauses once and for all. Even in 2015, in fact, the risk hangs over Italian citizens that Italy does not respect the commitments made with Brussels and that therefore the safeguard clauses included in the Stability Law automatically trigger. The next automatic increase could concern the VAT rate which risks increasing in 2016 for a value of almost 13 billion euros and 6,2 billion in 2017.
