CERNOBBIO: The annual meeting of Italy's business elite on the shores of Lake Como was again dominated by calls for reforms and gloomy discussion of an economic crisis now well into its sixth year.
With Italy's economy back in recession, business leaders sounded a note of impatience for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the energetic 39-year-old who took office in February, to get on with the task.
"In these past few years, I have seen little or no change in this country," Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of auto giant Fiat, Italy's biggest private-sector employer, told the conference in Cernobbio.
In short order, Italy has had four different governments, each of which has promised and largely failed to tackle stifling bureaucracy and corruption, cut taxes, reform inefficient labour market rules and keep control of tottering public finances.
Renzi has vowed to attack the structural weaknesses in a "1,000 day" programme that includes a major Jobs Act, a sustained assault on red tape and a radical slimming-down of the bloated political system.
Buoyed by a historic vote of over 40 percent in European elections in May, Renzi enjoys an approval rating far ahead of any of his rivals, running as high as 64 percent in the latest Ipsos poll published in the Corriere della Sera on Sunday.
Increasingly, however, there are calls for the blizzard of announcements to be followed up by concrete signs of progress. "My judgement about the Renzi government is not negative.
I think they are managing a very difficult situation," said Federico Ghizzoni, chief executive of Unicredit, Italy's largest bank by assets.
"But looking forward there is a need of further acceleration," he told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the Cernobbio conference.
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