A country on a knife-edge: Italy and its territorial differences (original) (raw)

Mario Monti's Italy and the European Debt Crisis

Review of International Studies

Italy is currently the democratic world's most underestimated European ally. Many commentators seem to have forgotten that despite its notorious institutional and debt problems the country remains one of the richest and most technologically innovative Western nations. While its politics are often theatric and superficial, its labour market inflexible and its bureaucracy opaque, Italy's real economic basis remains one of the strongest in the world. The continuing paradoxy of systemic failure and coeval structural productivity characteristic for modern Italy originates in the very foundation process of the nation in the 1860s. It is thus deeply rooted in the socio-political culture and is not likely to change anytime soon. However, these challenges might be viewed as good news in times of crisis: Unlike other Western democracies, Italy's economy and civil society are accustomed to functioning amid enduring institutional and political obstacles and crises. Disregarding alarmist voices, the country's outlook remains positive after all: Its systemic weakness is balanced by structural strength. In order to assess the situation of countries more properly in the future, we need a more sophisticated system of indicators that takes into account a greater, more complex picture; and this presupposes a more diverse and multi-polar system of rating agencies.

Italy and the global Economic Crises

2010

Global crisis in Italy has impacted on a system that had deteriorated after twenty years of political instability and economic decline. Since 2000 coalitions of both the Right and Left have been in office in Italy and neither has proved capable of solving Italy's problems. When the global economic crisis hit the country, Berlusconi's government confronted it in two main ways: supporting banks and big firms, and cutting public expenditure. This policy had also been recognised as the correct one by the Opposition but the way in which the Government put it into practice was contested - mainly on grounds of a lack of transparency, inefficiency and inequity. The global crisis has also shaped the political balance in Italy. The Lega Nord's predominance in the Government and the evident shift in Government policy towards the Lega's aims, have created political space for internal and external opposition to Berlusconi's coalition. The global economic crisis has without do...

Italy from economic decline to the current crisis

I Working Papers di ASTRIL svolgono la funzione di divulgare tempestivamente, in forma definitiva o provvisoria, i risultati di ricerche scientifiche originali. La loro pubblicazione è soggetta all'approvazione del Comitato Scientifico. esemplare fuori commercio ai sensi della legge 14 aprile 2004 n.106

Economic stagnation and recession: the difficult Italian transition to the Monetary Union

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2019

The stagnation of the Italian economy since the mid-1990s can only be understood with reference to the great transformations that occurred in the previous two decades. This long interval was characterized by a process of rapid modernization and, also, by economic policy mismanagement. These changes generated an inefficient institutional model, a dysfunctional variant of the coordinated market economies of Continental Europe. In the mid-1990s Italian policymakers had to make painful and swift fiscal and institutional adjustments to correct economic imbalances and comply with the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty. These adjustments were, however, incomplete and did not solve the two most important problems that explain the fragility of the Italian economy in the financial crisis: stagnation of productivity and little internal adjustment (in terms of wage dynamics and reallocation of labour and capital across sectors and firms) to fend off the consequences of a loss of competitiveness in world markets. RIASSUNTO La stagnazione dell'economia italiana dalla metà degli anni '90 può essere compresa solo con riferimento alle trasformazioni avvenute nelle due decadi precedenti. Questo lungo intervallo è caratterizzato da un rapido processo di modernizzazione, ma anche da politiche economiche incoerenti e dissipatrici, che hanno generato un modello istituzionale inefficiente, una variante "disfunzionale" delle economie di mercato coordinate dell'Europa continentale. Alla metà degli anni '90 i governi italiani hanno dovuto avviare aggiustamenti fiscali e istituzionali rapidi e dolorosi per cercare di correggere gli squilibri economici e soddisfare le regole del trattato di Maastricht. Tali aggiustamenti sono stati, però, incompleti e non hanno risolto i due problemi più importanti che spiegano la fragilità dell'economia italiana nella crisi finanziaria: la stagnazione della produttività e la mancanza di un adeguato aggiustamento interno (in termini di dinamiche salariali e di riallocazione del lavoro e del capitale tra settori produttivi e imprese) per limitare le conseguenze della progressiva perdita di competitività sui mercati internazionali.

CONVERGENCE IN ITALY BETWEEN THE SOUTH AND THE CENTRE-NORTH: AFTER THE EURO (YEARS 2002-2013)

On the one hand, in favour of the EMU, there were those who, inspired by the neoclassical model, argued that through the European Community’s economic and social cohesion policy it would be possible to eliminate not only so-called external diseconomies (lack of infrastructures, presence of crime, lack of human capital etc.), but also all those institutional frictions affecting the flexibility and mobility of factors, thereby allowing market forces to balance the per capita income across regions. On the other hand, against the EMU, we found Keynesian scholars, who, referring to the theory of circular cumulative causation, believed that neoclassical economic policy choices would only have accentuated the dualist system of weak and strong regions. The aim of this essay is precisely that of attempting to make an ex-post assessment of the effects of the single currency on the economy of the South of Italy. The period considered are the years 2002- 2013. The originality of the paper, compared to previous works is that also considers the years of the recent crisis.

The impossible transition and the unstable new mix: Italy 1992–2012

Comparative European Politics, 2013

The article addresses two questions crucial for understanding Italian democracy: first, whether since the beginning of the 1990s there has been a transition to a different democratic regime, and second if so of what kind. These questions can be answered by analysing the change of a few key institutional dimensions: the relationship between the executive and legislative branches; the number of parties and the characteristics of the party system; the electoral systems; the interest-group relations with government; the dispersion of power between different institutional tiers. By justifying theoretically the choice of these dimensions and analyzing the characteristics and extent of change we are able to find out what kind of democracy has been existing in Italy during 1992-2011 period. A few concluding remarks will be devoted to the key reasons of those partial changes.

Italy Since 1989: Events and Interpretations

Political Science Quarterly, 1998

More than most democracies, Italy lends itself to the Rashomon effect: what you see there depends not only on where you stand and on what else may govern your perceptions. The Italians, and notoriously those who control Italy's mass media, are masters at creating illusions that they themselves come to confuse with reality. So it has been these last several years in the matter of corruption. The Italian press, readily joined by its counterparts abroad, has depicted Italy as perhaps the most corrupt democracy in modern history. Readers worldwide have come to believe falsely that several thousand Italian politicians, industrialists, and other citizens have been duly arrested, tried, and convicted of corruption. The mass media and social scientists have used words like "revolution" and "Second Republic" so repeatedly that it is necessary to remind everyone that the First Republic is still very much in place. Both of these books place Italy's recent political history in better perspective. Burgess and Bufacchi provide a parsimonious overview of the tumultuous last decade. Bufacchi nicely delineates why democracy Italian style warrants the label "particracy" or "party state." These authors are correct in their surmise that, despite recent upheavals, Italy is unlikely to develop as a democracy of more "liberal" leanings-that is, one of individual rights and limited government. No better evidence for this conclusion is available than what we nd in the pages of The Italian Guillotine. By far the most pernicious aspect of the break-up of Italy's discredited political parties is the power vacuum it created, into which a hard-lining group of leftist magistrates has moved with Machiavellian resolve. It may be exaggeration to claim, as do Stanton Burnett and Luca Mantovani, that the Clean Hands campaign amounts to a coup d'etat. Nevertheless, few readers of these riveting pages will fail to understand how deep the threat to democracy is now represented by the Clean Hands investigators themselves, not by corruption. As the authors show, these magistrate-prosecutors brook no criticism from the press or prime ministers, from MPs or ordinary citizens, or indeed from presidents of the republic. Politicized many years ago, the magistrates involved are almost exclusively members of Ma