New year, old economic crisis

newyearoldeconomiccrisis Now that the Christmas celebrations are gone and we have put aside the sparkling wine of the new year, we must return to face reality, especially the economic one. These days the Italians began to assault the shops due to the opening of the sales season, which should give a breath of fresh air to the traders. But the Italian economy fails to recover its losses because, according to Istat, we are in a stalemate.

Reality is that the storm is just around the corner and could break out soon, once the last footholds provided by social safety nets will have expired. The employment in large companies decreased of 1,9% compared to the same month in 2008, according to the Institute of Statistics, but compared to September 2009 the percentage didn't change.
The data confirm that the loss of jobs in large companies, those with more than 500 employees, continues to increase. The crisis, therefore, is far from be over. Istat said that net of wage supplementation (other then those who are formally employed but not actually working), the decline was of 3.7% annually, while there has not been a change on a monthly basis.
And once again our country is worse than the European average because of long delays in investment in green economy. That's because in the past the political world did not care at all about the "green problem", without even thinking about jobs it could have created and the benefits that would have on the environment. We are lagging behind in research in this area, with numbers that show the total green investment in 2006 amounted to 1.968 billion euros, fell by 7.4% in 2007 while gross fixed capital formation increased of 13.3%.
Companies in the last year have not thought of correcting the problems on the environmental front, they have tried to fix the damage without planning a future and without changing machines. A work almost useless since it does not lead to improvements in the long term.
The new year will open in negative, on the employment front, with half a million jobs less than at the end of 2008. And with a growing number of families who cannot get to the end of the month, especially in Southern Italy where the percentage rises to 25% of families in difficulty, probably because in the South there are many big families (five or more people).
Crisis begins to overwhelm even the North, with the Veneto that in one year has suffered a sharp decline in recruitment and counted 30 thousand layoffs. It is not the only region in the north with increasing difficulties in employment, because all large production districts are in severe crisis. But newspaper don't really talk about this. Unemployment is not an issue to talk about. The media are too busy to talk about conflicts between the political forces and to spread government optimism. That's why they do not tell to families, who are experiencing the economic crisis, that this year too will be very difficult.