Hoping that science and research investments by pharmaceutical companies can quickly defeat the virus responsible for the tragic health situation that is affecting the whole world, it is time to focus the utmost attention of Governments and the ruling classes on what will need to be done to revive the economies which have recorded a significant drop in all countries, even if the intensity differs from state to state.
Italy is among the countries that have recorded a very strong fall in GDP and which expects to lose around 2020-9% of GDP for the whole of 10. And this without being able to fully evaluate yet the damage of the second wave of the pandemic which could be much heavier than imagined today, especially if lockdown conditions were to be reached in the midst of the Christmas holidays.
Europe has taken a giant step forward with the July agreements towards greater common responsibility for the recovery and growth of individual countries. But now it is up to the national governments to set up recovery and reform plans that they are consistent with the objectives indicated by Brussels and effective with respect to the need to raise the potential rate of growth, especially in those countries which in recent decades have failed to keep pace with the more advanced countries. And among these, Italy is, together with Greece, bringing up the rear.
There are many things to do and tight deadlines. To lend a hand to the political authorities in identifying the correct procedures to follow, and at the same time give the public opinion a useful "control framework" for following government choices, two scholars, Marco Buti and Marcello Messori have published on the website of the LUISS School of European Political Economy, an extensive paper in which they focus problems and potential of the funds made available by the EU with Next Generation EU and in particular with the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) which represents around 90% of the total of that programme.
In general terms Buti (who, in addition to teaching at LUISS, is chief of cabinet of Eurocommissioner Gentiloni in Brussels) and Messori underline two issues: Italy is not particularly late in presenting its plans in Brussels, but the impression is that he is operating in a somewhat confused and non-transparent way. Secondly, it is now clear that the success of the entire European program will depend onuse that Italy will make of that money and by the success that will be recorded in achieving the objective of increasing our growth rate. In short, the step forward towards the creation of a real European economy ministry, which still sees so many enemies lined up, will depend a lot on what our country will be able to do in the next 5-6 years.
The LUISS paper does not hide the difficulties. THEThe Italian plan must set itself three objectives which are, at least in part, in contradiction with each other: supporting growth, ensuring social development in equity, maintaining balanced management of the public debt. The latter is an aspect that has been largely neglected in recent months by a large part of the Government and by public opinion, including the qualified one.
The plan must be able to select a series of projects capable of first of all eliminating the bottlenecks which have prevented our country from growing at an adequate rate over the last twenty years. At the same time and in a synergistic way, it has to start a reform and investment plan that operates on very specific priorities. Everything must be linked by adequate governance based on a central control room equipped with adequate powers and which can select projects, take care of the start-up of activities and follow up on their execution. To do all this it would be necessary at least to start a process of reform of the Public Administration conceived for successive steps and the justice reform. It should be noted – and this is a notation that no one has made so far – that part of the European funds can be "substitutes" for national funds, which offers our Government the opportunity to have resources freed up from previous commitments to use adequately to support development projects.
But the Government does not seem to have the lucidity and determination to seize this opportunity to relaunch our economy. It is obvious that most of the ministers are engaged in containing the pandemic, but the fact remains that the method chosen by Prime Minister Conte for the Recovery plan, of act in the shadows so as not to arouse envy and appetites in the variegated political world, it has the drawback of not arousing in the mass of citizens cohesion and trust in a project of renewal of the country and its relaunch on the international stage.
The emergency measures are still criticized, as inevitable, while nobody can look beyond their nose. The risk is to not to use EU money, or to use it for projects that will have little impact on competitiveness and therefore on growth. The rest of the necessary reforms indicated several times by Brussels are no longer mentioned. Indeed, the risk is that in many fields, from the labor market, to pensions, to the presence of the State in the management of companies, we are going in the exact opposite direction to what the European authorities and investors had hoped for. Once again, bad politics risks squandering the opportunities offered to the country, condemning its citizens to sad stagnation.
