A new relationship between the government and the regions, plus two commitments to be made – on a voluntary basis – towards the European Commission. These are the suggestions that economists Marco Buti and Marcello Messori offer to Italian politics in an article published on the website of the "School of European Political Economy" (SEP) of the Luiss University of Rome. The text, entitled "This time Italy can't be wrong”, talks about how our country will have to manage the rain of billions arriving from Europe. And he gives four tips of method.
First of all, Buti, head of cabinet of the European Commissioner for economic affairs, and Messori, director of the SEP and full professor of economics at Luiss, state that the strategy underlying the operational projects must not consider "the initiatives that the various ministries or individual regions have in the drawer or that they process independently of each other", because "the past and repeated failures that characterized Italy's use of structural funds they should be a useful negative guide with respect to errors to be avoided”.
However, this does not mean "that the Italian government can centralize all the analyzes and decisions without making use of the contributions of the economic and social actors - continue Buti and Messori - The government should also act as a collector, coordinator and selector of the needs elaborated by institutions and intermediate bodies that do not act as mere bearers of sectoral or particularistic requests".
The third and fourth suggestions instead concern a subsequent phase, the one in which Italy will have to define the operational details of the individual projects selected: "In proposing the relative allocations of European resources by 2023 - the article continues - the Italy would strengthen its credibility vis-à-vis the European institutions and EU partners by assuming, on a voluntary basis, two irreversible commitments to the Commission: that of discard a priori all operational initiatives that have planned costs higher than a European benchmark for comparable activities; And that of interrupting the use of European funds already allocated for initiatives which, upon effective execution, exceed the scheduled costs or do not respect the time deadlines without compelling and extraordinary reasons".
Finally, Buti and Messori underline that times are now very short: "If it wants to activate an informal interaction with the Commission before the official dispatch by the first half of October 2020", the Italian government must complete a first version of the reform plan "already in mid-September", but "in order to prepare an articulated version (even if provisional) it is necessary that the preparatory work undergoes a drastic quantitative and qualitative acceleration already in the coming weeks”. In short, there is not a day to lose.
