— Analysis

Everybody loses. No other reaction seems possible to the decision to nationalize STX France Shipyard, rather than backing the decision of the Seoul tribunal to transfer the shipyard to Italy’s Fincantieri, an investor that French President Emmanuel Macron has judged “problematic.” Despite the first enthusiastic reactions in France – previously there were fears that the young president was a big privatiser and now he turns out to be a ...

Libya began as an Italian colony with the 1934 unification between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and ended in 2011 with the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, after 42 years of dictatorship, becoming a sort of “global colony” conditioned by the influence of external powers and by uncontrollable local actors. It is highly probable that this scenario will not be modified either by the meeting in La Celle Saint Cloud just outside Paris, between Tripoli president ...

Why does Vivendi Chairman Vincent Bolloré feel the need to further strengthen his grip on Telecom, even though he appointed his chief executive Arnaud de Puyfontaine as executive president to work alongside the CEO Flavio Cattaneo, who has now left after just 16 months? The risk is that – between Mediaset and Telecom – the Italian campaign of the French businessman transforms into a bad defeat for him. If the only way to get out of the ...

Between an Italian left which is increasingly in crisis and a liquid and post-ideological populism which is struggling to put down roots across the country – the third pole of Italian politics is enjoying a comeback. Silvio Berlusconi is the phoenix that keeps rising from the ashes. Due to turn 81 on September 29, the media mogul leader of the Forza Italia party has returned on the crest of a wave. Many among the center-right are responding to ...

Unfounded skepticism about vaccines in some communities, in developing and developed countries alike, has emerged in recent years as one of the most serious impediments to global progress in public health. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons why eradicable infectious diseases persist today. For example, the effort to eradicate polio worldwide has been disrupted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, where rule by Islamist militants ...

As the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted in 1987, computers are “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Since then, the so-called productivity paradox has become ever more striking. Automation has eliminated many jobs. Robots and artificial intelligence now seem to promise (or threaten) yet more radical change. Yet productivity growth has slowed across the advanced economies; in Britain, labor is no ...

One of the biggest lost opportunities of former Italian premier Matteo Renzi’s government was the reform of the civil service, data from recent studies show. On a scale in which 100 is the technological frontier of how a public administration can manage regulation of an advanced country, human resources, incentives, public services and transparency of decision processes (Canada and New Zealand came out on top), Italy is at 20. The ...

Former Italian premier Matteo Renzi’s “big break” has been developing for a while, since the Autumn of 2016 and well before the referendum rejecting constitutional reform that led him to resign three years after his major victory at the 2014 European elections. And today the leader of the left-leaning Democratic Party (PD) presents this break. It is a big one that hits the relationship between Italy and Europe. In black and ...

With global leadership now in question, the G20’s upcoming summit in Hamburg on July 7-8 could be the group’s tensest meeting ever. The summit process long pre-dates the G20’s founding in 1999. It was originally designed, in the 1970s, to align major economies’ domestic policies, thereby reducing uncertainty. But domestic politics have now created a new type of uncertainty. Whereas the international community ...

After the Italian government made up to €17 billion available in order to save the Veneto banks and €5.4 billion to refinance MPS, after Popolare Etruria and the other banks were “sorted out”, after having troubled numerous savers, after the Atlante Fund’s interventions, after the capital increases and while waiting for large divestitures of non-performing loans, now —the day after the European Commission ...

The objective, in line with the commitment taken days ago by Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, is to try to increase the room available in the next budget package to prioritize a more significant cut in the tax wedge (the difference between what a worker costs an employer and what the worker receives in their pay packet) for young people. The Economy Ministry is looking at how it can carry this out, and the scenarios being studied include an ...

Local elections are often a type of lottery, above all when voter turnout is especially low, as happened in Italy on Sunday. This time the winning ticket was picked up by the center-right. It governed six of 25 provincial capitals before the vote and now it will govern 16. But what counts the most is that it triumphed in some “trophy” cities: Genoa, Pistoia, and Milan’s Sesto San Giovanni. These are traditionally ...

The painful story of the two Veneto banks, officially in liquidation yesterday, is emblematic of the delicate situation of Italian banks, exacerbated by a European regulatory and supervisory framework that, as facts are proving, is turning out to be thornier than Procrustes’ bed. The situation has deteriorated since the European regulator expressed skepticism about the possibility of putting the recovery plan prepared by the new managers in ...

In all major economies, the so-called productivity puzzle continues to perplex economists and policymakers: output per hour is significantly lower than it would have been had the pre-2008 growth trend continued. The figures are stark, particularly so in the United Kingdom, but also across the OECD. And while it goes without saying that economists have many ingenious explanations to offer, none has yet proved persuasive enough to create a ...

On the one side, bank deleveraging is reducing credit flows to the economy. On the other side, the creation of the Capital Markets Union is gaining momentum but it is a slow moving process. That’s why Europe needs bridge finance products, the “economics of private placements”, that is, hybrid instruments that help SMEs in the not-so-easy transition from bank loans to equity or bond public issues. Italy and Germany ...

There were 96,000 fewer Italian residents in 2016, but the number of foreigners is rising, which now make up 8% of the population at the national level. Meanwhile the fall in births underway since 2008 is not stopping: for the second consecutive year births are below half a million. These figures were revealed by Italian national statistics office ISTAT as it presented an update on the demographic situation in Italy yesterday. The study ...

It is always misleading to extend the results of local elections to the situation at the national level. But after the first round of voting in 1,004 Italian municipalities on Sunday, the fact the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) was excluded from all run-offs in the main cities calls for some reflection. Reflection that is already underway within the party, which are also reckoning with the orthodox wing accusing the ...

Italy’s debt sustainability ghost is hovering over financial markets, yet again. “All scenarios are back on the table,” said an analyst commenting on UK’s surprise election results and Italy’s surprising setback on the electoral law reform . One of the worst case scenarios being analyzed by market participants worldwide is Italy’s political landscape and the risk of an upward trend of debt/GDP ratio, which hit ...

The emergency bank rescue of Banco Popular in Spain on the part of its rival Santander highlights how decisive the time factor is for preventing a bank crisis from becoming systemic and undermining the confidence of depositors. In just a few weeks, the government and Spanish authorities reached agreement with the European Central Bank and the European Commission and together activated an emergency plan that, in full respect of EU rules and without recourse to ...

Qatar Holding is ready to invest in Italy and new transactions in Europe. The decision by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to break off diplomatic relations with Qatar, triggered in a few hours in the Middle East, does not seem to change (at least for now) the financial strategy of the small Gulf country in the Old World. Sources close to the Doha government say that “other interesting operations in Italy will ...