How is Italy going and how the expensive bills will be cushioned. Word of Draghi

19 February 20222 years ago babelfish

What did the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, say at the press conference on 18 February

The council of ministers unanimously approved two decrees: one against the rise in bills and support for the automotive sector and another with the new rules on the Superbonus. Allocated a total of 8 billion, of which 6 for expensive energy. Among other things, an increase in national gas production is also expected. The auto industry fund has a dowry of one billion a year for eight years. Three assignments in total are possible for the credits of the building bonuses, but only in the financial or banking sector. More severe penalties are foreseen for technicians who certify falsehood.

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Below is the text of the speech by the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, who introduced the press conference held on February 18 at Palazzo Chigi after the approval of the measures on energy bills and not only in the Council of Ministers.

The approved measures are very rich in complex contents. I express my and the Government's thanks to the Ministers who are here tonight.

Two words on the general picture of the country. First: the health situation continues to improve. There have been an average of 54,000 new cases of Covid-19 a day this week, up from 67,000 a week ago. The number of positive people in intensive care has also decreased, now they are under 1000, down 20% from a week ago. The same for the number of ordinary hospitalizations, down sharply to 13,900 compared to 16,800 a week ago. The vaccination campaign is proceeding. Almost 89% of citizens over the age of 12 received two doses and 36.6 million Italians also received the third dose. So once again I want to thank Commissioner Figliuolo and his structure, the Civil Protection, the doctors and nurses and all the Italians who have chosen to be vaccinated for these important results. Among other things, in today's measures we have also approved a fund of 15 million euros for health care workers who died from Covid-19.

As for the economy, as I also said last week, we are still in a phase of slowing growth in Europe which, according to forecasts to date, should pick up quickly starting from the second quarter of this year. I say “according to forecasts” because we must be cautious, there are clearly geopolitical risks that cannot fail to influence growth in Europe and in Italy.

There is good news on the job market. The number of employees in Italy grew by over 650,000 between January and December and the employment rate increased by 2.2 percentage points, returning to pre-pandemic level. But of course there are some critical issues that we are used to but we don't have to get used to. Because most of the new employees, in the last year, have signed a fixed-term contract and only a quarter have signed a permanent contract.

So the government's goal is to revive growth. Sustained, equitable and sustainable growth. But we must also tackle the problem of the labor market, especially for young people, and the problem of precariousness.

This afternoon, precisely for this reason, we approved measures to contain the increase in the cost of energy and support the automotive sector. We are putting in nearly 8 billion euros, of which 6 for energy measures. We do this without resorting to new budget variances. In fact, we use the margins deriving from the excellent results in terms of public finance growth achieved last year and also described by the Governor of the Bank of Italy in his most recent speech.

With today's measures, we extend the measures to the second quarter and expand the measures to reduce bills in favor of businesses and households that we have implemented in recent months for the first quarter.
We intervene in a structural way to increase the production of Italian gas that can be sold at lower prices and to simplify and speed up, as Minister Cingolani and Minister Franco and Minister Giorgetti will shortly say, the installation of renewable energy systems.
We are also creating a billion-a-year fund to support the automotive industry and its supply chain, which are at the heart of the ongoing energy transition.

So the government wants to help citizens in this moment of difficulty, it wants to intervene right now to prevent the rise in electricity prices from steadily translating into lower purchasing power for families and less competitiveness for what concerns it's about businesses.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/primo-piano/come-va-litalia-e-come-si-attutira-il-caro-bollette-parola-di-draghi/ on Sat, 19 Feb 2022 06:44:13 +0000.