Let's start from these premises that we all share: the most recent economic forecasts for our country bring prospects of stabilization for the end of 2012 according to some and hypotheses of still impervious paths for achieving a balanced budget according to others.
The growth rate of our GDP should return to being slightly positive in 2013 due to the strengthening of global demand and a weak increase in business investments. Also following the fiscal consolidation efforts made by our Government, it is estimated that la recession will continue in the coming months and that ua substantial recovery of theItalian economy however, it will not arrive before 2014.
How to AGCI and as the Alliance of Italian Cooperatives (ACI), we immediately underlined that the path traced by the current Monti government was going in the right direction. We have indeed appreciated the effort to contain public spending and to avoid, at the same time, that measures, albeit necessary in their rigor, produce further depressive effects on the already declining consumption.
However, it now seems appropriate to point out that the so-called "spending reviews" it has not translated so much into a review of spending aimed at its rationalization and qualification, as in the application of often indiscriminate curtailments and cuts especially in some sectors, such as the social-health one, in which, perhaps more than in others, it is necessary to intervene on unproductive expenditure to re-evaluate the indispensable one to make the services provided quantitatively and qualitatively adequate to needs. Without the subjects who supply essential goods and services to the public administrations aimed at guaranteeing citizens' rights and protections being called upon to pay for the waste.
There is an urgent need to free businesses from a series of impediments that hold back their activity, preventing their growth and, indeed, often forcing them to perform difficult acrobatics to avoid stalemate and closure.
The reference here is, firstly, to too many bureaucratic formalities, which overlap often configuring useless duplications: a further simplification will certainly be beneficial above all in the start-up phase of entrepreneurial activities and a complete computerization of the envisaged procedures, if conducted in the name of efficiency and reliability, will reduce the time that interested parties must dedicate today to administrative procedures and will make communication with the competent offices more fluid.
Equally high priority seems to be the release of payments by the Public Administration towards supplier companies, now literally crushed by long-term delays, as well as the easing of the credit crunch which is severely holding back the growth and investment potential of our production realities: these situations, as it is easy to guess, weigh more on SMEs, which are less well-capitalised and more in need of bank support to finance their development programs.
Furthermore, as already mentioned, there are still many pockets of waste within the PA, including a excessive cost of the policy: precisely on these the ax must be struck with greater firmness. And, if the conditions for recovery are to be determined, it is also essential that the resources deriving from these interventions be directed, as an absolute priority, to the lightening of the tax burden on businesses and to the strengthening of the budget to be allocated to protecting the income of workers about to lose their job or already excluded from the labor market.
Indeed, he is right Marcello Messori when he says that the consequences of the necessary increase in productivity, in terms of increased unemployment and inemployment, will have to be absorbed by a universal and effective system of social safety nets.
On the other hand, how many, how are not wrong Alexander Laterza, while sharing the proposal to support a combined action between the Government and the social partners in the aforesaid direction, identifies the raising of the indispensable funds to carry it out as an obstacle that is probably insurmountable today.
The fact is that the resolution of the aforementioned problematic issues is configured as an essential prerequisite for restarting our economy, which will however be able to recover if a rise in consumption and therefore in domestic demand is accompanied, in fact, by a significant increase in productivity, such to allow the companies themselves to present themselves on international markets with a few more trump cards in terms of competitiveness.
Productivity growth cannot and must not be understood as a factor relating solely to work: vice versa, it is essential that it also involve material and immaterial capital, as obsolete instruments today compromise any possibility of development, like outdated technologies or knowledge that is not continuously updated.
Then, in order to concretely address the imbalance between the different areas of the country, one is needed infrastructure policy that at least reduces the gap between the more gifted territories (located mainly in the North) and the less equipped ones (almost all in the South).
The strengthening of research and a greater drive for innovation they are not ancillary elements in the context of a strategy aimed at relaunching the country in the globalized context, but on the contrary, they are configured as indispensable premises for being able to pursue this objective by focusing precisely on a greater production capacity and on a more appreciated quality of our products than to those of the competition.
At the same time, it is necessary to favor one fairer distribution of wealth, even finding the courage to undermine the long-established annuity positions, so as to be able to remunerate capital and work more adequately.
On the front, in fact, of the work, between those who claim ample flexibility and those who are in favor of the defense of perhaps now anachronistic guarantees, we must identify mechanisms and solutions that open the doors to a more effective combination between the moment of training and that of finding a job, making the professional needs emerging from the market meet in a more virtuous way with the school and university offer in terms of skills, knowledge and professionalism.
All, of course, without abandoning the unemployed and the unemployed to themselves, to support which it is necessary to set up an adequate system of social safety nets, without on the other hand lingering in hesitation in supporting active labor policies.
This within the framework of strategic choices that aim at the constructive involvement of employers' and workers' representatives and that they are in any case assumed even where it is not possible to obtain their sharing: the appeal is to the sense of responsibility of each actor in relation to the role he covers.
Le Social parties they are indeed called upon to represent the specific interests of the reference category, but this does not mean that the general interest can be pushed into the background, i.e. only some subjects should be exempt from sacrifices.
They are not tolerable in other words, sterile entrenchment positions in defense of the interests that are represented: with these attitudes we are not helping the country to get out of the quicksand into which it has slipped.
Il Government, for its part, it has the task of carrying out a role of coordination such as to guarantee the respect of all the interests in the field. The executive will have to assume the responsibility of deciding with courage, determination and immediacy, avoiding giving in to any hesitation, sometimes even at the risk of unpopularity and against any more or less veiled threat to social peace.
*** THE LATEST FIRSTonline SPEAKS on productivity: Marcellus Messori (September 30),Benjamin Lapadula (1st October), Alexander Laterza (3st October), Julius Sapelli (October 4)
