Italy: Pay Now Live Later?

Posted on by

The Italian government appears to be making plans to get to grips with the mounting burden of its debt. This is a move which is being widely welcomed. Under the latest plan, the deficit is forecast to be 2.7% in 2005, down from the 2004 target of 3.2% of GDP.

Without the changes, experts were suggesting the deficit could rise as high as 4.4% next year.

Apparently the only remaining tricky problem appears to be that of the promised tax cuts. Bloomberg today cites Bank Governor Antonio Fazio as joing the ranks of those questioning the viability of these cuts:

Bank of Italy Governor Antonio Fazio urged Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to focus on lowering debt and eliminating bureaucracy to boost economic growth rather than making tax cuts the country can’t afford.

Berlusconi’s government Thursday approved plans to cut taxes and adopt deficit reduction measures worth 24 billion euros ($29 billion) in 2005 to keep Italy’s budget from breaching European Union limits. The document didn’t say how 13 billion euros ($15.6 billion) in promised tax cuts for 2004 and 2005 would be funded.

As is not uncommon I have a different question: what will happen to economic growth in Italy if these cuts are implemented. Italy’s economy is projected by the IMF to grow at a rate of 1.2% this year. The previous two years were also extremely ‘lacklustre’. So the problem is that if you can only obtain a growth crawl when you are increasing the deficit, what are you likely to get when you start reducing.

Of course the attempts to get to grips with the problem – however inadequate they may be – are to be welcomed, but what will be the consequences? That is the uncomfortable question which noone seems to be facing up to at the moment.

This entry was posted in A Fistful Of Euros, Governments and parties by Edward Hugh. Bookmark the permalink.

About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

3 thoughts on “Italy: Pay Now Live Later?”

  1. So the problem is that if you can only obtain a growth crawl when you are increasing the deficit, what are you likely to get when you start reducing. Well, you might spread the impression abroad that you’re fiscally responsible, which might make investing in the place more attractive. As a relevant datum, Ireland’s FDI-driven boom only really started when “fiscal rectitude” became the watchword in budgeting.

  2. I quite agree Aidan that fiscal rectitude in itself is no bad thing – depending on context. Italy has no real alternative but to go for it.

    But I don’t buy the comparison with Ireland which has been following a different model. Ireland has a comparatively young economy (both in terms of workforce and in terms of its evolution), Italy has a relatively old one (in both senses: some might even say decadent). History and context are everything here.

Comments are closed.