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Consultations with President-designate Mario Draghi have begun and we do not yet know whether he will dissolve the reservation, but in the meantime it will be helpful to try to take advantage of his most recent written and oral interventions to try to understand the possible options of merit.
1) Good and bad debts. An expression that perhaps lends itself to summarizing it all is the one used by the former president of the ECB in his inaugural speech at the Rimini Meeting in August 2020: good debt and bad debt. The first is the one destined to investments in human capital, in crucial infrastructures for production and in research. If, on the contrary, the same resources are used for unproductive purposes, we will have created bad debt. This “crossroads” translated into Italy’s policy options for 2021 means that any Draghi government will be far more careful than Conte 2 when determining budget variations or the continued use of bonuses, cut for individual categories or individual sectors of the economy.
2) Zombie companies. Even when it comes to business support, the Draghi recipe can only be selective. The former governor is considered by experts as a Schumpeterian, believes in capitalism as a movement and not as a preservation of the existing. “Resources are not wasted on companies that are doomed or do not need them,” he wrote in the Report of the Group of Thirty, an international think tank, published last December. However, if Draghi wants to be consistent with what he has said in the past, he will not be able to simply say no to zombie companies, but will have to pay close attention to what are called active labor policies or more prosaic adjustments in employment. That is, assistance and recycling to workers who have to move between companies and sectors. An ambitious program for Italy given the state of employment services but which, in addition to avoiding compromising social cohesion and increasing unemployment, would qualify the government’s action in terms of modernizing the public administration.
3) Environment and digitization. In Rimini’s speech Draghi also indicated two goals that are fully consistent with the philosophy of the next generation of the EU. “The protection of the environment, with the reconversion of our industries and our lifestyles, is considered by 75% of the people in the 16 main countries as the first in the response of governments to what is the largest health disaster in our time”. He added: “Digitization, imposed by the change in our work habits, accelerated by the pandemic, is destined to remain a permanent feature of our societies. It has become a necessity: just think that in the United States the estimate of a permanent work shift from offices to homes is now 20% of the total days worked ”. The funds should be insured from Brussels, but the truth is that the draft Recovery Plan presented by Conte did not set out an industrial policy of coherent transformations, but rather a set of coriander options. A configuration that Draghi will eventually be able to correct.
4) Education and youth. Still in Rimini, Draghi closed his speech by speaking of a sector “essential for growth and therefore for all the transformations that I have just listed”, where the long-term vision must marry with immediate action: education and more in general. , investment in young people. persons. “The current situation – he added – makes a massive investment of intelligence and financial resources in this sector imperative and urgent.” What can this mean in practice? For now we can only answer that a Draghi Prime Minister would consider the Miur as a box to be filled with a quote of a certain thickness.
