On 24 January 2024, the Robert Schuman Centre hosted an online seminar to discuss the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). The session shed light on the risk associated with assuming that the NRRP would consistently boost the growth rate of the Italian economy without addressing the challenge of financing future investment management.
The discussion featured insights from Tito Boeri and Roberto Perotti, authors of 'PNRR: La Grande Abbuffata' ('The Italian Recovery Plan: The Great Binge').
Perotti examined the surplus of funds, the pressure to spend hastily, and the shortage of time and resources for proper utilisation: "Every organisation, private or public, has a limit to the capacity to spend and most local authorities are not able to manage the enormous increase in the number and complexity of tenders and procurement". Against this background, a significant risk is to compromise standards to meet the Plan's numerical targets in order to spend the allocated funds.
Manuela Moschella (Scuola Normale Superiore) and Laura Polverari (University of Padua) contributed to the discussion and further questioned the Plan's objectives' feasibility as well as how appropriate the priorities to allocate significant sums were.
The seminar was co-organised with CONGRIPS (Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society), and SISP (Società Italiana di Scienza Politica).