Italy racks up delays in spending EU funds, diluting growth impact By Reuters

By Giuseppe Fonte

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s document on spending its bumper half of the EU’s post-COVID funds is patchy at most attention-grabbing, info showed, as the minister accountable of the subject faced a European Parliament hearing on Tuesday over his doubtless contemporary job on the European Commission.

EU Affairs Minister Raffaele Fitto is in line to change into the EU Commission’s vice-president for Cohesion and Reforms, a situation that could maybe per chance give him responsibility of overseeing EU funds spending by member states, along with Italy itself.

If confirmed, Fitto would crawl away his as-yet unnamed successor in High Minister Giorgia Meloni’s govt with a no longer easy task.

Italy is due to receive 194.4 billion euros ($206.6 billion) in cheap loans and grants from the bloc’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) by 2026, bigger than another convey in absolute phrases.

Since the investment programme began in 2021, successive governments in Rome hang introduced the RRF money as the principle to unlocking the nation’s increase doubtless and modernising its sluggish economic system.

On the choice hand, Italy is in the encourage of schedule in the exercise of the 113.5 billion euros it has already secured, and also expects the funds to provide less of an economic increase than it had hoped.

Knowledge from the anti-corruption watchdog ANAC seen by Reuters on Tuesday showed that bigger than 60% of tenders in 2023 and 2024 were mild incomplete.

As of Oct. 2, Rome had spent 53.5 billion euros on initiatives to form Italy’s economic system greener, extremely-rapidly broadband networks and rail infrastructure, the latest accessible info showed.

This spending represents decrease than 30% of the total property to which Italy is entitled, and is below outdated govt objectives, already revised downwards numerous instances.

Tardy implementation puts Italy vulnerable to losing money except it renegotiates commitments agreed with Europe.

Delays already come at a label with the Treasury pronouncing in its multi-year funds belief that the recovery funds were expected to lift GDP increase by realizing 0.7 share facets in 2024, one third of the 2.1 facets it had to initiating with forecast in April 2022 for the latest year.

Complicating matters, the Italian economic system is seen as losing traction despite the EU funds and a deficit-to-GDP ratio centered to fall below the EU’s 3% ceiling simplest in 2027.

Most analysts and forecasting our bodies take a look at increase below 1% both this year, broadly in step with closing year’s 0.7% charge and a ways below the 4.7% reported in 2022.

($1=0.9409 euros)