The term spending reviews, plunged into the homes of Italians from the Monti era, in recent years he has harassed the worlds of politics and bureaucracy paralyzed by the idea of having to make cuts to the excessive costs of "public affairs". With Letta at the helm of the government, he started to get serious with the job a Carlo Cottarelli, appointed Commissioner for Public Expenditure Review. The work of Cottarelli's team, which lasted a year, resulted in a detailed report which, after months, has finally been made public. Since yesterday evening, in fact, on the dedicated institutional website spending review the document written by Cottarelli on the spending reviews.
The former commissioner, who has now returned to the International Monetary Fund, has entrusted his study on the spending review to 19 working groups who have put forward a great many proposals for cost reductions, in the short, medium and long term. Some of the numerous proposals of the working group have been collected in the Cottarelli report which includes many proposals to reduce public spending which would have led to a cost cut of 7 billion in 2014, 18 this year and 34 in 2016.
A detailed plan, of over 70 pages (dated 27 March 2014), in which the then Commissioner Cottarelli put in black and white the cuts to be made on each single spending macro-area. Among the most interesting proposals of the Cottarelli plan we find the stop to the accumulation of pensions and wages paid by the taxpayer, the merger of small municipalities, the standard costs not only for health care but also for regional councils.
However, a plan that the Government could only partially take into consideration: the project of the executive led by Renzi, in fact, does not focus on maxi-spending items, but on more limited interventions, such as individual municipal companies. Since November Cottarelli is no longer commissioner and in the next few days Prime Minister Renzi should give the task of taking care of the spending review to a loyalist of him: Yoram Gutgeld, former deputy and councilor of Palazzo Chigi. The economist Roberto Perotti will join him.
Yesterday Gutgeld declared that the goal for 2016 was a cut in spending of 10 billion euros, adding that if the Government were to be able to do more, it could "continue with the tax reduction operation". The cuts, Gutgeld clarified, "should be implemented in the 2016 stability law and then formalized by November of this year".
