Sometimes certain details are enough to understand how the context around us is in motion. In the first half of the year, Italy lost just a little more jobs than the countries around us: minus 2.96% against a 2.83% drop in the European Union, according to Eurostat. At first glance, it could have been much worse, because a crisis of this specific type paralyzes certain sectors that are vital for a country that is very strong in tourism and lifestyle activities. It was inevitable that Italy, Spain or Greece would suffer from the Covid recession more than average. As soon as you look inside the data comes out for a different picture. In sectors devastated by Covid such as tour operators, hotels, restaurants or cafes, during the first wave of the virus (the first six months of the year), employment in Italy dropped much less than in the rest of Europe. What helps explain Italy’s weakest response in terms of employment, despite the tens of billions spent in bursts to freeze the jobs of millions of people in layoffs, that we have missed the pars construens. There are activities that have exploded this year because all or almost all have needed them: digital services have seen employment grow by 17% in Europe (600 thousand more people), but remain firm in Italy; the pharmaceutical industry records a 10% increase in employment in Europe and an 11% decline in Italy; private employment offices reduce the percentage of employees in Italy by double digits, yet they increase them in Europe. In other words, in the middle of the pandemic we have spent tens of billions to take refuge in defense of what existed yesterday but we have not seized the opportunities of today. It is called sclerosis. exactly what we cannot afford when looking to tomorrow.
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All the more reason we cannot, because this is not a coherent picture. a landscape hit by a meteorite, typical of the upheavals that by now an interconnected, efficient, powerful global system is reserving us over and over again and for us it is capable of spreading even what goes wrong in every single country. It is now clear that the passage of a virus from an animal to a man on the outskirts of a Chinese city on a day in 2019 is bringing social, economic and in the long run also political consequences to Italy of which we have just seen the prologue. Despite himself, the country is about to experience one of the most transformative moments of the last 75 years.
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This is for not the replica of the Great Recession of 2008-2013, not necessarily. Nowhere is it written that the economic and social end of the story must once again be so negative. In that phase, Italy fell into the trap more than almost all other European countries and re-emerged later, more slowly and weaker. This time, however, the situation is different, more ambiguous, because the whole national community finds itself facing two paths and it is not clear which one it will take. The first path leads to the exacerbation of the problems that have tormented us for decades: public debt, the inefficient state, innovation and knowledge that is not widespread and even less respected, companies that are sometimes incredibly dynamic but unable to grow beyond certain limits that make them earthenware pots in the world.
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The second road instead leads in the opposite direction and the novelty which, a priori, today is not blocked: conditions can be seen to revive the country that were not there ten years ago. Rather, the middle solution is impossible, the idea of resuming in a few months the slow dragging of before: as if in the meantime there had been no pandemic, as if public spending and debt had not exploded and income had not collapsed; as if Covid-19 had not exposed the grotesque level of dysfunction of public powers and of inequality in society between guaranteed and unsecured, between young people and others, between territories, between women and men in labor systems. Trying to freeze the world from before would mean choosing the path of twisting, perhaps slow at first but then suddenly unstoppable.
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And there is no excuse why now, one after another, a series of preconditions for taking the best path are falling into place. Vaccines will allow for a gradual return to normal during 2021. On the international level, the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House blurs relations between commercial powers and offers Italy the opportunity to place itself at the intersection of all games, because the government in 2021 will have the presidency of the G20 and the co-presidency of Cop26, the United Nations event on the climate just in the year in which the United States returns to the Paris Agreement for the reduction of emissions. As for Europe, we can count on the support of the central bank and on the fact that for more than a year there will be no pressure to tighten the public finances.
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Then of course there is the Recovery plan, € 209 billion to rebuild the country in six years. The fears and annoyance over possible delays in Italy have no basis in the European calendar, because for now only Portugal has definitively presented its national program. Instead, they have a lot of foundation in the evident paralysis of a government that struggles even to find a health manager in Calabria. The same secrecy imposed on all projects by the prime minister only fuels mistrust and irritates the allies – including France – who have been very exposed to Italy in recent months. The truth, on the other hand, is that every week the government offices work with Brussels on the specific components of the Recovery plan and it is time to show with transparency that it is getting serious.
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The alternative is therefore this: to cling to the holds that lead us to the high way out of this crisis, or sink into the lower way towards screwing. The latter is populated by government and majority politicians who blather about debt cancellation, without understanding that this would mean devastating the financial system and hitting the families who own those government bonds; without thinking that the effect for the rest would be zero since the debt bought by the central bank does not actually weigh on the government: the Treasury recovers the interest paid on those bonds every year as dividends from the Bank of Italy. But perhaps this is the problem. Having people in the ruling class who don’t understand these things.
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November 28, 2020 (change November 28, 2020 | 22:32)
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