The EU Fiscal Framework: The Proof of the Pudding

I have been invited to participate to a round table organized by Bruegel , the Brussels based think-tank, assessing the Fiscal framework in the Eurozone in the present crisis (the complete program is here). In brief, I made the following four points (slides are here). 1) Since 2009 there was an unprecedented fiscal consolidation in […]

TFR in busta paga?

La proposta di anticipare il TFR (trattamento di fine rapporto) nella busta paga al fine di stimolare i consumi mi lascia molto perplesso. Si tratta di spostare redditi dal futuro al presente e sappiamo che questo fatto accresce i consumi solamente per quelle famiglie che vorrebbero indebitarsi per consumare  ma non hanno accesso al mercato […]

Gordon Is Back

Gordon Brown , the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (Economy Minister) from 1997 to 2007 who succeeded Tony Blair as UK Prime Minister in 2007 until 2010, made an impressive comeback in the British political arena on the Scottish debate. Here is an effective speach delivered yesterday

Nemo propheta in patria

This month is no exception: this blog’s views  from the US are about 6.5 times those from Italy (I wonder the interests from Ukraine)…   Visualizzazioni di pagine per paese (Page Views by Country) Stati Uniti 6047 Italia 923 Ucraina 377 Romania 280 Germania 116 Federazione Russa 112 Francia 98 Cina 68 Qatar 58 Paesi […]

Labor Productivity and Wage Allocation: Thom and I Were Right!

The EU Commission’s recent report on Monitoring progress in the Member States for Italy, on pag 2,  acknowledges that “Slow productivity growth is mostly due to inefficiency in allocating resources. Indeed, Italy’s investment rate is comparable to that of other euro-area countries, but its level of capital efficiency is lower and declining.According to a recent […]

Renzi, il PIL e la crescita (e Padoan)

Sarà il riflesso condizionato di un professore di economia, ma quando ho letto su Il Sole24  di oggi il testo dell’intervento del primo ministro Renzi alla trasmissione  “A porta a porta” sugli effetti della correzione Istat del PIL che includerà le spese di ricerca e sviluppo ed i proventi di attività illecite, ammetto di aver […]

Deflation next?

A nice paper from the St Louis Fed is making the point that, unlike the Federal Reserve’s second Quantitative Easing (QE2), Mario Draghi’s  new measures, which includes the 550b Targeted Long Term Financing Operations (TLTR0), announced on May 8 and implemented on June 5, are so far failing in raising market expectations of future inflation. […]

Renzi & Acemoglu

According to Francesco Giavazzi’s  editorial on today’s Corriere della Sera , the Prime Minister Renzi is getting the “reform sequence right”, first institutions, second economics, as Renzi is convinced that, “following one of the most promising research line of recent economic theory, see  Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson “Why Nations Fail”, a country’s success depends […]

Se Cottarelli lascia

Nel marzo 2014, Carlo  Cottarelli, commissario alla revisione della spesa nominato dal Governo Letta, annunciava un piano dettagliato di possibili tagli alla spesa pubblica. Questo piano prevedeva un preciso “crono-programma” che avrebbe dovuto produrre a settembre 2014 la presentazione di un insieme di misure per il prossimo triennio, durante il quale i risparmi avrebbero raggiunto […]

On the Sustainability of the Italian Public Debt

On June 26th, I took part to the Conference on The Sustainability of Italian Public Debt, Non-Standard Proposals”, which took place at the Corriere della Sera Foundation, toghether with Guido Tabellini (Bocconi), Lucrezia Reichlin (LBS), Charles Wyplosz (Geneva), George Papacostantinou (ex Economy Minister, Greece) and moderated by Danilo Taino (Corriere). The slides of my presentation […]