Italy is bad. Or more exactly, its GDP is struggling to regain growth. It is one of the few OECD countries that can not recover from the "2008 crisis", and in the big concert of all those who have an opinion on the issue I propose mine, simply based ... on physics.
That Italy has a GDP that is struggling, the statistics tell us clearly.
Annual change in Italian GDP since 1961 (blue curve, so-called "annual growth"), average per decade (red curve), and trend curve on the variation (green dashed lines). It is easy to see that each decade has been less "pompous" than the previous one since the beginning of this series, and that the decade that started in 2010 shows an average rate of growth ... negative. Italy is in recession, "on average", since 7 years.
World Bank data.
This is generally the case with Western economies, and its debt ratio is starting to rise to the top for both public and private debt.
Italian public debt brought back to GDP since 1995. Eurostat data.
Household debt brought back to GDP for Italy. Bank for International Settlements.
Debt to the non-financial sector (businesses, households) reduced to GDP for Italy. Bank for International Settlements.
All of this would not matter - at least from a strictly economic point of view - if growth came back, because then the money to repay all that would be available. But why growth does not come back? This is the fault of the lack of reforms, say some. This is the fault of the lack of reforms, but not the same (reforms), say the others.
And if it was just the fault ... the lack of energy? In Italy, as elsewhere, the machines that surround us everywhere (rolling mills, chemical factories, trains, refrigerators, elevators, trucks, cars, planes, stamping machines, drawing machines, extruders, tractors, pumps everywhere, etc.) develop a power which represents 500 1000 times that of the muscles of the population.
If these machines run out of energy, they work less, so they transform less, and GDP suffers. Is not that what would have happened?
First of all, the fact is that the energy available in Italy is less abundant today than it is 10 years ago.
Primary energy used in Italy (sometimes called "primary energy consumption") since 1965. There is a maximum in 2005, 3 years before Lehman Brothers. It is impossible to blame the drop in consumption for a crisis caused by the negligence of bankers!
the following here:https://jancovici.com/transition-energetique/choix-de-societe/litalie-et-lenergie-un-cas-decole/