(Finance) – “The financial package for the next three years moves along a very narrow path in which different pressures and needs must find a difficult balance: responding to the difficulties of families in the face of strong price growth; adjusting salaries public without triggering a negative price-wage spiral; strengthening a system of health and welfare services, but not only, tested by the pandemic emergency; ensuring greater flexibility in social security choices; maintaining adequate investment rates in the country’s infrastructural modernization process. All this guarantees the process of rebalancing the accounts and a gradual reduction in the debt to GDP ratio”. This is what the president of the Court of Auditors Guido Carlino spoke before the joint budget committees of the House and Senate, as part of the preliminary hearings for the examination of the bill containing the “State budget forecast for the financial year 2024 and multi-annual budget for the three-year period 2024-2026”.
“Such a design – he explained Pug – is pursued using the available margins in a trend framework that presents very limited spaces. Consistent with the government program, despite these constraints, the proposed measures appear to achieve significant results in terms of workers’ disposable income, in the process of consolidation and greater sustainability of the social security system, as well as in the necessary process of simplification and reorganization of public intervention structures. But the constraints on the maneuver have only partially made it possible to provide a response in terms of new resources to the problems that afflict our welfare system, to the need to strengthen the push for the process of modernizing the infrastructure and the growth of investments.
The balance between the different needs that is described therefore remains very exposed to the elements of a difficult economic and social situation. If the implicit call in all areas of public action for a more careful use of resources appears correct, the framework is subject to the risk of not being able to maintain the quality of the services offered, risking nullifying, especially in the case of the weakest sections of the population, the monetary benefit we intend to provide. Already from next year, the choices that have been made, often of a temporary nature, will require, in order to be confirmed, not simple decisions in terms of rationalization of spending. Choices that will have to find important support from a decisive fight against tax evasion and from an efficient and effective implementation of reforms and
investments envisaged by the PNRR”.
For the Court of Auditors there maneuver is “overall not very incisive in terms of new interventions in favor of public investments of a general scope”, but with a “strong imbalance towards measures aimed at supporting specific projects, first of all in terms of financial weight, the Bridge over the Strait, followed by a series of other minor interventions, with limited impacts on the economic system due to the marked localisation”. Therefore “the country’s growth prospects appear to be fundamentally dependent on the timely and complete implementation of the projects included in the Pnrr, not being highlighted by the new planning of budget stimulus measures that are equally innovative and capable of competing” with the plan.
The healthcare resources – the Court notes – are “certainly relevant” but “not sufficient to reverse the reflexive profile” of the sector.
On pensionsfinally,” he noted Pug – “it is to be hoped that a stable framework of regulations regarding expenditure will soon be reached: balanced rules, not subject to frequent changes and capable of balancing the different micro and macroeconomic needs, could also have beneficial effects on the spending behavior of companies families reflecting more reliable expectations about their future disposable income”.