Two months after the Italian general election on March 4, amid continuing uncertainty about what kind of government will emerge, a strange complacency seems to have set in. Yet it would be foolish to believe that a country where anti-system parties won 55 percent of the popular vote will continue to behave as if nothing had happened.

The populist Five Star Movement, which won by a landslide in Southern Italy, has promised to increase spending on public investment and social transfers, while reversing the pension reform enacted a few years ago. The League party, which captured the North, also promises to dismantle the pension reform and cut taxes, and has openly mooted the idea of leaving the euro. Both parties want to relax the European fiscal straitjacket, though in different ways.

The economic consequences could be profound. With a 132 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, Italy’s public finances are precarious. Should markets start questioning their sustainability, the situation would quickly spiral out of control. Italy is far too big for the European Stability Mechanism to tackle a debt crisis there in the same way it did in Greece or Portugal. The European Central Bank would need to come to the rescue. The debt might even end up being restructured.

There is little doubt, therefore, that the European Union will insist on fiscal discipline. The question is what strategy Italy should adopt to tackle its fiscal problem. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Italy’s high public debt is not the result of runaway budget deficits -- at least not of recent ones. With the exception of 2009, the primary balance (which excludes interest payments) has been in surplus for the last 20 years. No other eurozone country matches this performance.

The root of Italy’s public-finance problem is that it inherited excessively high debt from the 1980s and has not recorded significant economic growth for two decades. Real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product in 2017 was at the same level as in 2003, and real GDP per capita was at the level of 1999. With a stagnant denominator, it is hard to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio: the legacy of the past continues to weigh excessively on the present.

The lesson, therefore, is that Italy’s key priority should be to revive growth. But this cannot be accomplished by relaxing the brake on public spending. The bulk of Italy’s growth problem comes from the supply side, not the demand side. As documented in a recent paper produced by the Bank of Italy, the country’s productivity performance is truly dismal: over the last two decades, output per employee has decreased by 0.1 percent per year, compared to 0.6 percent growth in Spain, 0.7 percent in Germany, and 0.8 percent in France. 

Furthermore, the demographic outlook is frightening: the working-age population, currently at the same level as in the late 1980s, is set to decline by 0.5-1 percent annually in the years to come. The burden of repaying the debt will fall on a smaller labor force -- even more so if the retirement age is lowered.

Boosting productivity is therefore imperative. On paper, the recipe for success looks straightforward: economic policy should aim at reducing the gap between larger companies, whose performance matches those of their German or French counterparts, and smaller firms, where productivity is half as high. 

Small companies everywhere are less productive than large firms -- after all, growth is a selection process -- but Italy’s peculiarity is that such companies are both much less efficient and much more numerous. For each innovative champion that sells cutting-edge products on the global market, there are many poorly managed companies with fewer than ten employees that produce only for the local market. It is this high degree of fragmentation that explains Italy’s poor aggregate performance.

Two Italian economists who teach in the United States, Bruno Pellegrino and Luigi Zingales, have investigated what explains this peculiar situation. They emphasize family management of the smaller firms and a tendency to select and reward people on the basis of loyalty rather than merit. As they put it, familism and cronyism are the ultimate causes of the Italian disease.

These observations have direct implications for future discussions between the next Italian government and its European partners. The latter would be well advised to put the need for a growth and productivity policy, rather than simple adherence to fiscal targets, at the top of the agenda. 

It is hard to gauge whether the Italian government that will emerge from the ongoing negotiations will be ready to respond. All political parties have clienteles to take care of, and the insurgents are no exception. 

They should realize that though they may be popular, unfunded distributional proposals will ultimately prove ineffective, even more so if the productivity problem is not addressed head-on. After its political upheaval, Italy now needs an economic one.


By Jean Pisani-Ferry 

Jean Pisani-Ferry, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin) and Sciences Po (Paris), holds the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa chair at the European University Institute and is a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank. -- Ed.


(Project Syndicate)