Abstract
Autore:
Lenti Targetti Renata
Titolo:
"Sviluppo e declino del sistema economico italiano"
Long-term trends suggest that Italy’s current economic crisis is not the result of an unfavourable business cycle or the global economic and financial crisis. Instead, Italy’s crisis accompanied by persistent slow economic growth is above all the result of decade-long structural shortcomings and impediments. Many factors explain why and how Italy experienced sluggish economic growth and increasingly uncompetitive productivity over decades. The causes of Italy’s economic crisis, this author argues, are deeply rooted in the past and strictly interconnected. These causes will be discussed and analysed in a historical perspective.
While embracing free economic market principles firmly integrated Italy in an international setting leading to fast export-led economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, the focus on export-led economic growth became a problem and impediment in the decades after that. Export-led growth favoured the consolidation of a productive system centred around small and medium-sized manufacturing firms, many of which are concentrated in Italy’s north. Such firms needed low labour costs, cheap natural resources and energy to survive in an increasingly competitive international setting. Social cohesion and strong domestic consumption, in a setting of relatively low wages, was supported and indeed guaranteed by generous public expenditures. After the oil crisis of the 1970s up until the beginning of the 1990s, Italy was able to remain internationally competitive through the regular devaluation of the Italian lira. Today, due to Italy’s Euro membership, this kind of adjustment is no longer possible.
At the end of the 1980s, the converging path towards other European countries stopped. The burden of a rising public debt, the distorted composition of public expenditure, the decline of the country’s manufacturing sector industry and insufficient investments into research and development had a negative and lasting impact on the country’s competitiveness. But also failures coming from the institutional and political setting, the lack of a good ruling class, the inefficiency of the public administration and family ties, added to what is referred to as Italy “lost opportunities”. A ruling class above all oriented at short-term profits instead of a long-term commitments and gains, was unable and unwilling to initiate and adopt the needed structural reforms.
In order to restore Italian economic growth, this author argues, not only new and effective monetary and fiscal policies, but also and indeed above all changes to Italy’s administrative and industrial policies in order to reduce the various kinds of dualism are needed: dualism between the country’s north and south, between industries using and not using advanced technology, between regular and temporary workers, between big and medium-small firms, between relatively protected old and not protected young workers. Reducing the above-mentioned dualism is imperative to promote investments in research, infrastructure and human capital and to reduce the high dependence on energy imports, the youth unemployment rate and increasingly growing inner-Italian inequalities and poverty.
