What is not said about Italy’s no to the ESM
Not just Mes and Pnrr. Challenges and scenarios for Italy. The speech by Paolo Longobardi, honorary president of Unimpresa
It is a great mistake, said Milton Friedman, to judge governments by their intentions rather than by their results. And this is what Unimpresa has always done: evaluate what happens and what could happen, but never take promises and announcements too seriously. Politics, after all, is also made up of half lies and hidden truths: those who live, like me, on the street, since they started doing business and then representation activities, know what consensus means and therefore are not scandalized by to less concrete announcements. The facts, however, are not contestable. All our reasoning starts from those. What has happened in the last year shows that something is finally changing in our country. With great difficulty, something moves.
The focal point of this turning point is the National Recovery and Resilience Plan: we are witnessing a recovery in investments in infrastructure and public works, hoping that everything agreed between Italy and the European Union will be achieved. There are three guidelines that I hope will always be followed, also because we must be accountable to Brussels: transparency, honesty, effectiveness of choices. In 2023 alone, contracts worth 70 billion euros were awarded, with a sharp reduction in time from an average of one year to just two months. It is a very important fact, because it reveals a radical change of pace in our bureaucracy, even if local delays sometimes run the risk of nullifying the indisputable, brilliant results achieved so far at a national level. Territorial administrations must abandon old logics of local convenience and tips, aiming to behave with greater foresight: a renunciation at home can guarantee, also in terms of speed, successes on a national scale. It is the logic of the country system, which has been talked about for a long time, but which, however, remains a decidedly little applied slogan.
However, I saw little of the country's system, for example, when observing the political debate on the new ESM (European Stability Mechanism). Italy's " no " to the ratification of the reform of the bailout fund was excessively exploited: yet another annoying partisan clash in which no one remembered a couple of trivial things. The first is that the "old" ESM continues to exist and, therefore, will be able to intervene in the event of difficulties in some European country. The second is that the main innovation, i.e. the interventions in banking crises, does not eliminate the possibility that individual states solve the problems " at home ", as has always been done up to now, even in Italy. We read that the Italian government's choice would have been met with negative reactions from international bodies and institutions. The "no" from the Italian Parliament, however, was not followed, as many observers feared, by the collapse of the financial markets nor did the tension on our public debt increase (the spread even decreased). All this to remember that politics is made up of exploitations that are often based on nothing and on ephemeral exploitations that represent damage to the system. Cui prodest?
Democracy is made up of contrasts, but excesses are dangerous. Today we need, above all, a long-term vision: we need that "national industrial plan" that brings together, throughout Italy and at all levels, the challenges to be pursued together, public and private, in that team logic which is essential to resist the often unfair competition from foreign giants. Moreover, (private) companies, even the smallest ones, will be able to benefit, directly and indirectly, from the (public) investments made thanks to the Pnrr: one tenth of the growth of the Italian gross domestic product will, in fact, be due to investments in infrastructure. Structural GDP growth means more consumption, more investments, more employment. Next year growth should be 0.9%, with an estimate that the EU has updated upwards in recent weeks, confirming the positive changes I have already mentioned.
It is necessary to remember that the enormous machine of the Pnrr will move, overall, almost 200 billion euros until 2026: money managed by the State and by the public administration in general, almost all of which will be returned to the EU. Therefore, new debt, to be exploited in a constructive way. However, we enter an almost minefield: that of public spending, a topic to which the fiscal question is directly linked. Here are the (too many) taxes: to resolve the excessive tax burden it is not possible to start from reducing taxes on families and businesses. The problem to be faced (and solved) is, precisely, the reduction of public spending: we hope that the tax system will become not only less burdensome on an economic level, but also less complex on a regulatory level. However, the magic wand does not exist and to obtain a concrete "cut" in the rates it is necessary to intervene on the expenditure side: only if these fall will less revenue be necessary. It seems very easy, but in reality it is almost a mission impossible. Ministerial commissions and parliamentary task forces responsible for implementing a spending review plan have been trying, for about forty years, to indicate a path and suggest various types of solutions, but up until now there has always been a lack of political will: because the waste in the state coffers they have been useful to many. And it's still like that.
The State must do its part, ensuring services and infrastructures in line with the best international standards, charging a "fair" contribution; businesses must contribute in many ways to the country's economic growth. One of these is to innovate, always. Innovation is a much used word, perhaps little measured. From my point of view, innovation is also tradition: it means doing old things in a new way. This is, from my point of view, the North Star to follow: it is the strength of Made in Italy, of the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises which are the lifeblood, the backbone of our economy.
For a country that comes from decades of internal and international looting, I hope that 2024 is the beginning of a new path: made up of fewer taxes, a public apparatus that works and an entrepreneurial system capable of innovating in the name of tradition.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/no-mes/ on Sun, 24 Dec 2023 08:08:56 +0000.