Confcommercio-Censis report: 30 years of mistakes have destroyed well-being, but we still don’t understand that the cure is another
Yesterday the Confcommercio-Censis report was presented and the data is impressive. With 30 years of economic and political mistakes we have destroyed the roots of our national well-being, starting us all in a vicious circle of declining consumption and poverty, and the even more tragic thing is that the solution has not yet been understood.
What did the head of the Confcommercio press office, Mariano Bella, say? “ In 2022, at constant prices, we have recovered neither the per capita disposable income of 2019 nor, much less, that of 2007, which is the maximum. We are even 150 euros down in real terms compared to 1995, that is almost thirty years ago. Just to say that the thirty years of low growth are felt in our pockets and in the issues of social unease and the growth of absolute poverty that we debate every day”. “Thanks to the growth in the propensity to consume, “in the long run, real spending has gone a little better than income: we have almost recovered the levels of 2019 but we are still below the highs of 2007 by 800 euros each”. So the little extra consumption that we have experienced is derived not from a higher income of families, but only from a little state aid.
This incontrovertible fact that tangibly affects people over forty can be seen in the following graph offered by confcommercio:
Not only is the current real per capita income lower than it was in 1995, but the AVAILABLE one is much lower. This means that on the one hand there is no room to further expand private consumption, on the other that there is no room for savings, and therefore for the accumulation of savings. If there is no new savings, there are no resources to invest in, or at least no internally produced resources. All the talk about "Low productivity" goes astray if there is no capital accumulated through savings to invest.
The problem is that the solution presented by Confcommercio does not exist: " In the meantime we must choose the right path: which can only be that of the reforms and investments of the Pnrr" concluded Bella "to make current the potential for trust that exists among families, as we have seen, and build a new phase of robust and lasting growth, after the boom of the two-year period 2021-2022 and the transition period constituted by this complex 2023".
It is precisely thirty years of wrong reforms that have brought us to this point. The privatizations have only cut resources for research, which was previously based mainly on large public complexes. The precariousness of work has brought down demographic growth. The very precariousness of services, of which Confcommercio should be an expert, has damaged an important sector, broken the social structure of urban centers for what? To then see the large malls, the large shopping centres, in turn in crisis due to the explosion of online commerce, with more and more empty spaces? How can we think of rebuilding the economy with loans such as those of the PNRR which, due to their nature and their constraints, are not very productive and almost as expensive as public debt?
The road to recovery cannot be the one indicated by Confcommercio, which only appears to be the repetition of ideas generated by those who have no ideas. We need to re-discuss the basis of what has happened in the last thirty years, not continue to confirm it.
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The article Confcommercio-Censis Report: 30 years of mistakes have destroyed well-being, but we still don't understand that the cure is another comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/rapporto-confcommercio-censis-30-anni-di-errori-hanno-distrutto-il-benessere-ma-ancora-non-capiamo-che-la-cura-e-unaltra/ on Sat, 13 May 2023 09:00:22 +0000.