WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #174 - PNRR between incapacity and delays (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 With regard to the PNRR, the national plan for rebirth and resilience,

born thanks to loans disbursed on common debt guaranteed by the European
Union at low interest rates to revive the economy of the countries that
are part of it, Italy struggles between and delays. What is happening is
not only the result of the country's chronic inability to spend the
resources available, due to a chameleonic and cumbersome bureaucracy,
but depends on structural deficiencies relating to the criteria by which
the effectiveness of investments is evaluated. There is in fact a
profound difference between the logics that guide the European Community
and those that govern the activity of governments, such as the Italian
one, which make public investments an opportunity to employ resources
destined to be effective in two directions: that of investment in
itself, with respect to the economic and productive objectives that it
has, and the fallout in terms of profit and clientelistic employment
that it produces, of illicit profit destined for the facilitators and
political sponsors of the investment, to the share of profit that
political decision-makers reserve for themselves to repay themselves
from the patronage and electoral point of view for the resources
obtained. In other words, every public productive investment is an
opportunity to redistribute a significant part of the invested resources
at the clientele level so that the productive value of the investment
decays and perishes in relation to the strength and penetration capacity
of the lobbies in the division of profit and in the acquisition of more
or less significant shares of it.
This logic was the one that guided the use of the flood of public money
which poured especially towards the territories of southern and central
Italy, which have also benefited over the years from investments that
should have raised the local economy through public aid . This is the
case of the twenty-year experience of Cassa per the Mezzogiorno, which
in its first phase, however, had the merit of operating on investments
that had the breadth and territorial breadth to allow for the creation
of infrastructural works. It is no coincidence that the Cassa instrument
definitively entered into crisis with the reform of Title V of the
Constitution which, by fragmenting national unity, made the Regions
autonomous and sectorised and subdivided the interventions of the Cassa,
thus becoming ineffective, in the absence of a centralization of
decisions and investments themselves.

Investments and reporting criteria

It is completely obvious and natural that any investment must correspond
to a precise statement of the expenses incurred which allows to verify
the correct execution. In this aspect of public investments, the
activity of the Public Administration was concentrated, which in the
control phase was limited, when it was able to carry them out, to the
accounting one relating to the execution of the investment, in order to
verify that there were no illicit states in the assignment of contracts,
in the execution of works, in the use of suitable materials and anything
else its correct execution This formal control has often been
criticized, as ineffective, due to the offenses committed in carrying
out the checks during the various phases of the awarding of the work
contract and its execution. Hence initiatives such as that of the
Procurement Code which had the declared task of limiting, if not
avoiding, corruption in the awarding of the contract itself and in the
execution of the public investment.
Well, in the case of the PNRR, the European Commission does not limit
itself to asking for reporting that meets the aforementioned criteria
and therefore transparency in the matter of tenders and the execution of
the work, but requests a verification of the result, i.e. it reasons
according to an alien logic to the Italian tradition of public
investment. Once the investment has been made and the work completed,
the Commission requires a further step to verify the effectiveness of
the investment itself. For example, if a kindergarten was financed, the
Commission asks to know how many children are users of the structure,
how much staff is employed, whether it is sufficient to provide the
service, what is the quality, the time span of the service , whether the
target population of the investment actually needed the asylum places
created, and therefore, in other words, to know what the economic impact
of the investment is. The control of the result thus conceived clashes
clearly with the methods with which Italy has proceeded to draft the
requests relating to the PNRR, or at least a large part of them.
In drafting the projects and requests, the focus was on the planning,
ideation and inventiveness of the requesting administrations, of the
subjects who formulated the requests, rather than scrupulously verifying
what the impact was on the production structure and on the request for
services that the project entailed. It therefore happens that when the
project is grounded, one is realizing that, in many cases, it does not
correspond to a positive impact in response to the needs emerging from
the territory and that therefore it becomes impossible to give
a positive response to the result check, once the investment has taken
place, with the risk of seeing the Community financing of the investment
itself verified. Thus he realizes that he cannot build cathedrals in the
desert with impunity, as has often been done. strong in the fact that
public investment requires expenditure to be paid by the State, an
anonymous subject, which does not need to be accountable.
For example, if we take one of the Italian regions that have one of the
most disastrous health systems, Calabria, as a reference point, we can
verify that significant investments have been made in the region for the
construction of hospital and health care structures. that these were
abandoned even before being completed (as was the case for the Scalea
hospital) when not, as in the case of the Paola hospital, abandoned the
day after having inaugurated them, in homage to an incorrect calculation
with respect to the needs of the territory, or free and to allow the
malfunctioning of public health, to benefit the private one.
These distortions add up to those deriving from the objective lack of
planning skills of the territorial structures which, impoverished by
years of progressive liquidation of the technical and planning skills
they possessed, in the name of cost savings of the structures, do not
have planning skills, which means that Italy is the holder of a real
record with respect to Community funding, in particular by the Regions
of the South, which have renounced to use funds precisely because of the
inability to plan and spend the available resources , returning them to
Brussels, so much so that the case of a motorway in Poland that is
popularly called is famous. autostrada Italia, built with EU funds
recovered from those not spent and not used by Italy.

The special economic zones

The mechanism described above makes it possible to identify one of the
causes of the current delays in the grounding of PNRR projects, reasons
of a structural nature to which must be added the struggles relating to
project direction and management tasks. The fact remains that the
obligation to have the investment financing obtained revoked because it
is ineffective from the point of view of the stakeholders, i.e. the
recipients interested and involved in it, today holds back the executive
from proceeding with the implementation of the projects and obliges it
and advises him to ask for renegotiations so as not to take out loans
which will in any case have to be honoured, even if granted at low
interest, and which will not correspond to an effective economic benefit.
Except that from the reports relating to the negotiations with the
European Union there is a new signal that risks putting a spanner in the
works of the policy of the right-centre government, above all as regards
the implementation of differentiated autonomy. The European Commission
and Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, welcomed the
proposal made by the Minister for European Affairs, the South, Cohesion
Policies and the Pnrr to establish a single special economic zone for
the South. This would unify the current 8 existing zones. The affected
regions are Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Molise, Calabria,
Sicily and Sardinia which would form a macro-region for which
particularly favorable legislation and above all centralized
coordination would be introduced of investments.
Special economic zones are usually created to attract more investments,
especially foreign ones, and promote the development of particularly
disadvantaged regions. The instrument is not new and dates back to 1937
and has been successfully used in many countries; aims to extend the
simplification and acceleration measures of the approval and
authorization procedures and support to businesses to the whole of
Southern Italy, extending the single authorization for the start-up of
production activities and the reduction of the deadlines for completing
the procedures by a third, ensuring transparency and efficiency of the
entire process with the creation of a "Digital One Stop Shop". In this
way, the aim is to create an advantageous tax regime, which contemplates
the total reduction of taxation on some types of companies; apply
simplified administrative procedures; ensure facilitated repatriation of
investments and profits for foreign companies that invest in them;
guarantee reduced duties on imports, exemption on taxes for export;
subsidized concession fees.
The downside is the fact that in these areas the working conditions of
the workers worsen enormously, with strong limitations on the
fundamental rights of workers, as past experiences around the world have
shown. Thus profit is once again created by exploiting the workers even
more brutally.
The most profound contradiction of the provision that we intend to
undertake is constituted by the fact that in the face of a possible
implementation of differentiated autonomy for some regions and the
decentralization of powers that characterizes this operation for the
South and this large part of the country, a criterion is applied
completely different, indeed opposite, which provides for the
centralization of decisions is a singleness of operational interventions
entrusted to the central powers with a strong reduction of autonomy. It
must also be said that the intervention takes place on an area that is
not homogeneous from the point of view of economic and structural
characteristics, because the situation of Campania and Puglia is
different from that of Calabria or Basilicata, not to mention of the
decidedly particular conditions of Sicily and Sardinia.
A government that defines itself as nationalist and patriotic is
disjoining the institutional structure and governance of the country
through decisions that are never disconnected and chaotic, handing over
to future generations a balcalized structure of the Italian territory
that responds to increasingly localized interests, implementing
centrifuges, which not only dissolve national cohesion, making
impossible the homogeneous application of constitutional rights
throughout the territory, and therefore precluding the possibility of
taking advantage of an effective implementation of services aimed at
implementing the principle of equality of citizens, but of done away
with the country from coordination with the rest of Europe

G. L.

http://www.ucadi.org/2023/07/28/pnrr-tra-incapacita-e-ritardi/
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