Financial Times: Prodi si dimetta.

[frontista]

Il Financial Times torna ad attaccare il presidente della Commissione europea Romano Prodi rinnovando l'invito: 'Si dimetta'. In un editoriale intitolato 'Qualita' innanzitutto per la Commissione Ue', il quotidiano britannico invita i leader europei che 'si stanno guardano intorno' alla ricerca di un nuovo presidente 'a fare, questa volta, una scelta migliore' della precedente. 'La performance di Prodi come presidente della Commissione -secondo Ft- e' stata disastrosa'.

[brunik]

Sono contento che tu legga il Financial Times, perchè non ti sarà do certo sfuggito questo lunghissimo articolo sul numero di ieri, l'articolo centrale, con tanto di foto di Berlusconi in atteggiamento disperato.

E' un articolo sul fallimento di berlusconi, si intitola:
"FARDELLO BERLUSCONI: L'ECONOMIA LANGUE E LE RIFORME SONO IN STALLO".

Questo su Prodi non l'avevo visto: a che pagina è?



COMMENT: Berlusconi's burden: Italy's economy languishes and reforms have stalled
By Tony Barber
Financial Times; May 25, 2004



Wednesday, May 5 found Silvio Berlusconi in Paris, talking about the achievement of his centre-right coalition inhaving become, that same day, Italy's longest-serving government since the collapse of fascism in 1945.

"This is another promise wehave kept," the prime minister toldreporters. "I told the electorate that we would provide a stable government, and that's what we've done. Mine is thelongest government in terms of durationand the only one in the history of the republic which will maintain all its promises."

He had good reason to sound pleased. On June 11 his government will complete a full three years in office. Italy's 58 previous governments after 1945 served, on average, less than a year. Mr Berlusconi's first administration in 1994 broke down after only seven months.

But in terms of practical steps to improve Italy's economic performance, Mr Berlusconi has found it hard going since his crushing election victory in May 2001.

The 67-year-old billionaire businessman vowed to reinvigorate the economy with the kind of entrepreneurial dynamism that had made him Italy's wealthiest man.

Three years on, weak international economic conditions and endless political squabbles in his four-party coalition, together with deep-rooted structural problems in the Italian economy and an inconsistent approach to reform have put Mr Berlusconi's vision far from reach.

Italy's budget deficit and, more fundamentally, its public debt are two of the most pressing problems facing Mr Berlusconi's government.

At first sight, Italy did better than France and Germany last year by recording a deficit of 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with 4.1 and 3.9 per cent respectively. But without one-off revenue-raising measures such as real estate sales and fines collected under tax amnesties, Italy's deficit would have been closer to 4 or 4.5 per cent.

"Italy's underlying fiscal position is probably the most serious in the euro area, keeping in mind that it is the country with the highest level of debt," says Pasquale Diana, economist at JP Morgan Chase.

Italy's fiscal difficulties have become so acute that the government is expected to announce immediate and far-reaching cuts in expenditure as soon as a round of European Parliament and local government elections on June 12-13 are out of the way.

The cuts will amount to as much as €10bn, according to those familiar with the plans. They will be followed by more cuts, totalling about €12bn, to enable Mr Berlusconi to keep his promise of reducing income tax by €12bn in 2005-06 - in time for Italy's next national election.

"We know that the tax cuts have to be fully funded, otherwise people won't believe in them and they won't spend money and give the economy the boost it needs," says one senior official involved in preparing the plans. Both sets of cuts are likely to meet furious resistance from the groups that will be hardest hit - above all, companies, government agencies and regional authorities that will be asked to accept a reduction in annual state subsidies of tens of billions of euros.

But Mr Berlusconi's government faces no choice. The public finances are under more intense scrutiny from financial markets, the European Commission and Italy's eurozone partners than at any time since Italy became a founder member of the 12-nation single-currency area in 1999.

The government is confident that spending cuts will help it keep this year's deficit under 3 per cent and avoid censure from its European Union partners, who earlier this month gave Italy until July 5 to come up with new deficit-cutting measures. France and Germany are expected in 2005 to exceed the 3 per cent limit for a fourth successive year.

But Italy's enormous public debt - 106.2 per cent of gross domestic product at the end of 2003 - makes it a different case from France and Germany. Although Italy's treasury is highly skilled in debt management and financial markets seem in no hurry to demand a higher risk premium for holding Italian bonds, the government knows it must put the debt on a sustainable downward trend.

Sustainable debt reduction requires Italy to run a cyclically adjusted primary budget surplus of about 5 per cent of GDP. In 1997 this surplus was 6.7 per cent. Under Mr Berlusconi, however, it has dropped to 3.4 per cent, largely because of excessive spending and revenue shortfalls. From 2001 to 2003, spending has exceeded nominal GDP growth each year by 1.5 percentage points.

Italy's fiscal plight would be less severe if economic growth were stronger. But here, too, the Berlusconi project has run aground.

In the late 1950s and 1960s Italy was transformed from a relatively under-developed country, in which 40 per cent of the workforce was employed in agriculture, into a booming industrial economy.

Those heady days are a distant memory. Average annual growth rates have fallen from 3.7 per cent in the 1970s to 2.4 per cent in the 1980s to 1.5 per cent in the 1990s. In 2002 and 2003, growth was only 0.4 per cent and 0.3 per cent respectively. The government recently cut its forecast for this year to 1.2 from 1.9 per cent.

Among eurozone countries, only Germany has fared worse over the past decade.

The blame for Italy's weak performance does not rest with the government alone. Factors outside Mr Berlusconi's control, such as the fiscal squeeze applied in the 1990s to ensure Italy qualified for eurozone membership, and the rocky conditions of the global economy since 2000 have also contributed to the problem. he one issue that stands out more than any other is the growing loss of global competitiveness by Italian businesses. This decline has become more apparent since 1999 since Italy, as a eurozone member, no longer sets its own interest rates and cannot resort to currency devaluations.

"The relaunch of competitiveness, a theme long at the centre of [Italy's] worries and attention, cannot be delayed," Luigi Biggeri, president of Istat, the national statistics institute, said recently.

In 1995, Italy's share of world exports was 4.5 per cent. Last year it was about 3.3 per cent. Small and medium-sized companies with fewer than 300 employees make up 99 per cent of all businesses, and their failure to invest in product innovation and research have left them exposed to competition from China, Indonesia, Turkey and eastern Europe.

Giulio Tremonti, finance minister, often expresses frustration with alleged unfair Chinese competition and with EU red tape that he says hampers business. Unless the EU stops issuing absurd regulations, he said last year, "Europe will end up like a chicken in the pot of a Chinese cook".

It is telling, however, that Italy has lost market share even when compared with its eurozone partners. From 1996 to 2003, Italy's share of eurozone exports - including trade with countries sharing the euro - fell to 12.2 from 14.4 per cent. By contrast, Germany, for all its problems, increased its share to 30.9 from 29.9 per cent.

Many businessmen and economists say an important reason for this is the Berlusconi government's failure to tackle the multitude of small monopolies that suppress competition inside Italy. Aspirin, for example, can be bought only at pharmacies, not in supermarkets. Lawyers, accountants, taxi drivers, even owners of beauty salons, all benefit from restrictive product and service market regulations.

"Healthy market competition in Italy is a little like a red light in Naples - an option, a suggestion that isn't automatically taken up," jokes Giuseppe Tesauro, chairman of the national antitrust authority.

As a consequence, inflation has been consistently above the eurozone average. Inflation is exacerbated by the rising cost of transport, secondary education and other services provided by local authorities. Ominously, annual Italian inflation has been 1.1 percentage points above the German rate over the past five years - and Germany is Italy's largest foreign market.

All this cries out for a serious effort to address the low productivity that has pushed up Italy's unit labour costs and weakened its ability to compete. Here lies perhaps the government's most glaring failure.

In its first 100 days, the government liberalised fixed-term labour contracts, repealed inheritance tax and gave companies tax rebates on investments.

But it then locked itself into a long and fruitless struggle with trade unions over abolishing Article 18 of Italy's labour code, which allows judges to reinstate workers deemed to have been unfairly dismissed from companies with 15 or more employees. Article 18 is rarely applied in practice in Italy, and few businessmen thought its abolition was a pressing matter.

The fight over what was at best a symbol of Italy's rigid labour markets, at worst an irrelevance, blocked progress on more meaningful reforms.

In 2002 the government settled for a half-baked solution that foresaw the suspension of Article 18 for an experimental period of three years. But the CGIL, Italy's largest and most militant union, did not accept this proposal, and in any case the three-year period has yet to begin because it depends on the prior passage of a pensions reform bill.

Italy spends about 14 per cent of GDP on pensions, a proportion expected to rise to 16 per cent by the early 2030s unless reforms are introduced. The bill aims to cut pensions expenditure by an annual 0.7 per cent by requiring many Italians, from 2008, to work until they are 60 rather than 57 to qualify for a full state pension.

So fierce have been the struggles in Mr Berlusconi's coalition over the bill that its terms are considerably watered down from the finance ministry's original proposals.

Yet its passage into law would be a positive sign, and one senior government minister predicts that will happen before the end of July. If so, it would in theory unblock the path for labour market reforms including a plan to change Italy's unemployment benefit system.

Maurizio Sacconi, undersecretary of state for welfare, says the aim is to help people find work by linking the benefit scale to a national workforce register that is accessible to new private job agencies. "We've never had a transparent and efficient labour market," he says.

According to Istat data, Italy's employment participation rate for people aged 15 to 64 was 55.4 per cent in 2002. Even the EU's 10 new member-states had a higher average rate at 55.9 per cent.

The critical question now for Mr Berlusconi is whether reforms have been delayed so long that they will fall victim to Italy's electoral timetable. A bad result in June's elections need not bring down his government, but it could easily provoke more internal quarrels that paralyse his leadership.

In that event, the need for reform would still be urgent - but the prospects for rapid action would be ever more remote.

POST-PARMALAT

When the gigantic financial fraud at the Parmalat food group was exposed in December, few measures seemed more urgent in Italy than a reform of corporate governance practices and financial markets regulation.

Almost six months later, a bill addressing these issues is still stuck in parliament. There will be no movement until after European Parliament and local government elections on June 12-13.

The main bone of contention is the treatment of false accounting, an issue at the heart of the dual role played by Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister and business magnate.

Large parts of the post-Parmalat reforms have been agreed on a bipartisan basis between Mr Berlusconi's centre-right coalition and the centre-left opposition. These include broader powers for Italy's stock market regulator, tougher penalties for market manipulation and guarantees for minority shareholders on company boards.

But agreement on the reform bill broke down last week. One problem concerned the creation of a fixed term of office for the governor of the Bank of Italy, the central bank, whose regulatory powers would be clipped.

The government and opposition broadly agree that the governor, currently appointed for life, should be limited to an eight-year term. Unresolved, however, is the question of how long Antonio Fazio, the governor since 1993, should remain in office. A compromise, in which Mr Fazio is allowed to hold the reins for between nine and 24 months after the bill becomes law, may be possible.

Far more divisive is the issue of false accounting. One of the first and most controversial measures taken by Mr Berlusconi's government, after it assumed power in June 2001, was to push through a law that softened punishments for certain types of corporate false accounting and made it more difficult to prosecute such offences.

False accounting is a charge that Italian prosecutors have levelled against Mr Berlusconi in several court cases relating to his business affairs since the 1980s. The prime minister accuses the prosecutors of being leftwing plotters out to destroy his career, but his critics say the false accounting legislation was crafted to extract him from his legal problems.

These disputes have affected the post-Parmalat reform bill because the centre-left opposition wants to restore the tougher, pre-2001 law on false accounting, a proposal opposed by many Berlusconi allies.

The idea of bringing back more rigorous punishments for false accounting was first aired by Giulio Tremonti, finance minister. He is determined that the post-Parmalat reforms should be credible with international financial markets.

However, for other politicians in Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, it would be unthinkable to approve the reversal of the 2001 law in the run-up to an election. They fear it would be an admission that the softer treatment of false accounting had been introduced to help Mr Berlusconi.

But for the centre-left opposition, there are no votes to be won from tamely accepting that the 2001 law is here to stay. In the end, the treatment of false accounting, and the fate of the reform bill in general, may depend on the outcome of the June elections.

[frontista]

Della serie "uno è peggio dell'altro".
Che stima che hanno dei nostri "statisti"...

[brunik]

E questo è niente: dovresti sentire cosa dicevano del tuo amico Mussolini ai bei tempi...

Ma tu invece di difendere il nostro Presidente Prodi dagli inglesi ti metti a sghignazzare?

VERGOGNA.

[brunik]

In Origine Postato da Malik
Dall'alto della tua enorme intelligenza perchè non posti l'articolo tradotto?


DAI BRUNIK FAI UNO SFORZO PER NOI POLLISTI IGNORANTI CON LA SECONDA ELEMENTARE

No, ti posto un'altra cosa invece.

Malik, l'hai sentita la novità di stamattina? GLI ITALIANI VOGLIONO LE DIMISSIONI DI BERLUSCONI.

Dicono che è incapace, mi confermi?

[Come no!]

In Origine Postato da brunik
E questo è niente: dovresti sentire cosa dicevano del tuo amico Mussolini ai bei tempi...

La so, la so!

Era la storia dei treni!

[frontista]

In Origine Postato da brunik
E questo è niente: dovresti sentire cosa dicevano del tuo amico Mussolini ai bei tempi...

Ma tu invece di difendere il nostro Presidente Prodi dagli inglesi ti metti a sghignazzare?

VERGOGNA.

Ah Ah Ah Che accostamento..!
No, non ci riesco neanche un po': chi si deve vergognare non sono io.

[MrBojangles]

In Origine Postato da brunik
Sono contento che tu legga il Financial Times, perchè non ti sarà do certo sfuggito questo lunghissimo articolo sul numero di ieri, l'articolo centrale, con tanto di foto di Berlusconi in atteggiamento disperato.

E' un articolo sul fallimento di berlusconi, si intitola:
"FARDELLO BERLUSCONI: L'ECONOMIA LANGUE E LE RIFORME SONO IN STALLO".

Questo su Prodi non l'avevo visto: a che pagina è?

Sarà come quello di Amati (da The Economist), preso da giornale.it, sugli elogi a Berlusconi.

[MrBojangles]

quote:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Origine Postato da Malik
Dall'alto della tua enorme intelligenza perchè non posti l'articolo tradotto?


DAI BRUNIK FAI UNO SFORZO PER NOI POLLISTI IGNORANTI CON LA SECONDA ELEMENTARE
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ne trovi un RICCO sunto (in italiano) su "Ballisti!".

Se poi non riesci a capire NEANCHE quello ti mando un tutor.

[Metapapero]

In Origine Postato da MrBojangles
quote:

Se poi non riesci a capire NEANCHE quello ti mando un tutor.

CEPU mi raccomando: quello preferito da Vieri