With the surge of commodity prices, Italy risks paying a rather high tax in 2022: well 66,4 billion euros more than in 2019, equal to 3,5% of GDP scheduled for this year. This is not a real tax levy, but the increase that our country will have to absorb on the import front. A problem that concerns industrial raw materials, but also unprocessed food products and – as everyone already knows, given the explosion in bills – energy.
Raw material prices: the “conflict” scenario…
The Observatory on Italian public accounts does the calculations, arriving at the figure of 66,4 billion assuming "a scenario - we read in the analysis - in which commodity prices remain at the level reached at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine", or taking as the reference date February 24, the day of theattack by Russia. With these parameters, the total cost of imports of raw materials and unprocessed food goods would come to 135,2 billion euros, against 68,9 billion in 2019, 46,9 billion in 2020 (the year in which world trade collapsed due to the outbreak of the pandemic) and 84 billion in 2021.
Of the 66,4 billion euros, writes the Cpi Observatory again, “35 billion concern the natural gas and 16 billion the oil”, while the remaining 15 billion are due “mainly to the increase in the price of aluminium, copper and cereals”.
…and the “average prices” scenario
A second scenario considered by the study foresees instead that in the rest of 2022 the price increases will be less heavy on average of those recorded in the first two months of the year: in particular, the reference point considered by the Observatory is the average between the prices of the "conflict" scenario and those recorded the day before the outbreak of war, 23 February. In this case, the increase in expenditure for our country could drop to normal 57 billion euros, Equal to 3% of GDP estimated for 2022. The total cost of imports of the goods considered would in fact amount to a 125,9 billion euros.
The nine billion less than in the first scenario is almost entirely attributable “to the different price of natural gas – concludes the Observatory – whose future fluctuations will play a crucial role in determining the final amount of the implicit tax that Italy will pay to the rest of the world in 2022”.
