Secretary General Lauro: “Effects of the pandemic plus structural deficiencies in the country”
Italy’s gross domestic product will return to below 2000 levels at the end of the year, when the economy of our country grew by 4%. Ten years later, in 2010, the GDP increased at the rate of 1.8% and at the end of 2020 it should record a sharp decline of 12%. Inflation went from 2.2% in 2000 to 1.8% in 2010, while this year should stop just above zero (0.2%). Investments are down, from 20.8 of GDP in 2000 to 18% in 2018, while the share of savings remains high, stable above 20% of GDP. 2020 – in which the absence of an industrial policy is denounced – according to which negative repercussions were also recorded on the front of state finances: public debt stood at 91% of GDP in 2000, 112% in 2010 and, at end of this year, is expected to rise to 150-160%; between 2000 and 2020, spending on social security and pensions went from 15% to 22% of GDP. The only positive element is that relating to employment: the employment rate was 57.2% in 2000 and today stands at 63.2%, even if this figure does not take into account the inactive and how many, by stopping to search a job, leave the labor market, thus restricting the pool of potential workers.
“The harmful effects of the pandemic are added to the structural deficiencies of a country-system, which, in the last twenty years, faced with the challenges of globalization and the European ‘stakes’, without having the ability to collect the positive stimuli of Unione, has not had a shred of industrial policy, which is coherent, continuous and flexible »comments the general secretary of Unimpresa, Raffaele Lauro. “The Italian economy and society are desperately trying to get out of the darkest period since the Second World War. National production this year – reads a long paper by Lauro published on the association’s website – is in an unprecedented fall, estimated at -12%, and the next one is not expected to recover if not a fraction of what lost. The exclusion from work between the unemployed and the unemployed has reached the limits of tolerability, many companies have had to close their doors and are unlikely to reopen them, incomes are being reduced, outstanding debts are opening chasms in bank balance sheets and public debt is traveling to peaks from which you cannot descend without getting very hurt ».
According to Lauro, “the two Conte governments of this eighteenth republican legislature, paralyzed by contradictory programs, supported by spurious majorities, have not even raised the problem of defining an industrial policy. Furthermore, the current government, overwhelmed by the epidemic emergency, has so far tried to plug the crisis by resorting to interventions in normal times that are incompatible with a competitive market economy, launching only buffer measures and revealing a total lack of strategy for exiting the abyss into which we have fallen. In particular, there is a lack of an ‘industrial policy’ vision and strategy that orientates and directs the choices of businesses, families and the public sector towards those factors driving economic and social development. Instead, there are interventions of pure welfare, which generate interminable dependencies, and only a few fragments of support for some important activities, such as innovation and exports, without a prospective framework for the coming years and without affecting the deep strains that have penalized for years and our country is impoverished ». For the general secretary of a company “It was erroneously believed that incentives and aid to this or that industrial sector were enough to achieve it, while on the contrary it embraces all the nodes of the system, both in manufacturing and in services, because there is a tight interdependence between these sectors. The confirmation, for example, can be found in the trends currently underway in the world, in which we are witnessing a ‘servitization’ of the industry, in the sense that its success is increasingly linked to the services it uses before, during and after. the production processes “.
