Happy birthday euro: poorer Italians 20 years ago
From 1 January 2002 the euro officially became the currency of 12 EU countries, including Italy, the result? Poorest Italians 20 years ago, just look at how the wealth of every citizen has changed.
The numbers speak for themselves: the real per capita GDP of 2019, therefore even before the pandemic, was already lower than that of 2001, the last year of the legal tender of the lira (while in the previous thirty years it had almost doubled).
One can endlessly argue whether the fault lies with the euro or whether it is just a coincidence, but objectively things went like this. Let us now look in detail at the situation at the regional level.
NORTHERN ITALY LIKE BAVARIA? NOT REALLY
According to ISTAT data , in 2019 the real national per capita income amounted to € 28,923 (at constant 2015 prices) while in 2001 it was € 29,707 (-2.6%). In 2020, it further decreased to 26,467 euros (-10.9%).
The impoverishment also affects the richest part of the country, in fact the per capita GDP of northern Italy decreased by 1.6% compared to 2001 (before the pandemic), while for the center and the south the collapse was -5, 4% and -7.1%.
Of course, in absolute values, the northern regions are the richest, but the fact is that even in the Po Valley, things have not gone much better than the rest of the country.
SAVE ONLY TWO REGIONS, BUT WITH THE PANDEMIC …
At the regional level, only Trentino Alto Adige and Basilicata had, in 2019, a per capita income higher than that of 2001, while for all the others it was lower (slightly or much depending on the case).
The regions that lost us the most were Sicily , Valle d'Aosta and Umbria (the latter clearly the worst) in that order, both before and after the pandemic.
For the sake of completeness, here is also how we plunged into 2020. But rest assured that now the new economic boom begins (with lots of donkeys flying), which will soon bring us back to phenomenal pre-covid values.
In short, what to say? The euro's biggest success is having the economy at pre-euro levels, just like Greece .
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The article Happy birthday euro: poorest Italians 20 years ago comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/buon-compleanno-euro-italiani-piu-poveri-di-20-anni-fa/ on Fri, 31 Dec 2021 23:05:25 +0000.