Ah the joys of a first post. I’ve been pondering the idea of writing a blog for many months now and after a markedly uneventful day I decided to stop pondering and actually do something about it, how hard can it be, right?
Well, that’s where I encountered my first hurdle. During these months of pondering I had accumulated quite a few ideas and actually choosing one to start the blog off was proving to be like trying to nail jelly to a wall.
After a while I decided to try and ease myself slowly into all this blogging lark and I’ve decided to write about a topic that I have been interested in for some time. Why has/is the recession having such varying impacts in Europe? We’ve all had first hand experience of the recession over here but how is it affecting our European brethren, and in particular my native Italy. In no way am I claiming to be able to comprehensively answer this question, however hopefully you will take away a little bit of knowledge and a few unanswered questions
Well, I think we can begin to understand these differences by coming to terms with the fact that the last century has seen France and the UK come away from world empires and great wealth. Italy on the other hand has been recovering from 2 centuries of decline and poverty. While you may try to think that I’m painting a sob story that is not the case! This decline has taught us the “art” of surviving or how they say in Napoli “l’arte di arrangiarsi”. Due to this, Italians (especially in the south), are rarely adventurous as far as investing is concerned, and thus the many tales of woe we heard in the UK about multimillion pound investors who had lost everything never really made the press in Italy.
I will try to not turn this blog into a political mouthpiece and will refuse to be drawn into a debate about our “beloved” president and his policies ( so don’t try ), but I hope Berlusconi is right about the Italian economy being less at risk (the banks are different, more provincial, and Italy is more manufacture orientated).
Despite the reassurances of our president I know for a fact that my family are finding it much harder to “reach the end of the month” as we say in Italy. The Telegraph recently carried an article about how the Italian government is having to bail out the parmesan (Parmigiano Reggiano ) industry to the tune of £45 million. This is a shocking development, P-R is one of the most popular foodstuffs in Italy and the industry is worth around £1 Billion, anyone who thought the traditional Italian artisan industries would cruise through the recession has been proved mistaken.
However despite the difficulties that artisan producers are experiencing, Italy boasts one part of the economy that is seemingly utterly recession proof. What is it I hear you ask, well, It’s not something we’re particularly proud of. Recession or no recession it’s business as usual for Italy’s mafia clans (Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, Calabria’s ‘Ndrangheta and Campania’s Camorra), and liquidity is no problem for the criminal clans. This liquidity helps them to grow and weave themselves more tightly into the fabric of legitimate business, through buying up firms stretched by the crisis or burdened by debt.
I’ve tried to make sense of the situation in Italy and have come to the conclusion that the situation ( much like in the UK ) varies between industries. Large scale collapses such as that of AlItalia have been few and far between ( and it could be argued that the company was rotten before the recession struck ) and while some small/medium-sized enterprises, which constitute the backbone of Italy’s productive system have suffered, most are rapidly recovering.
Thank you for reading my first fairly long, quite confused post.
