A country ill prepared to face the economic crisis and its Duration

In Italy, the 2008 economic crisis and ensuing Great Recession hit a country that had already experienced a long period (since the currency crisis in 1992) of sluggish growth, marked by the difficulty of the Italian productive system in modernising in the face of deepening European unification, the growing integration of global markets and the spread of new technologies (OECD, 2012; Figari and Fiorio, 2015). Households’ real incomes, which had seen a constant increase in the previous decades, had stopped growing (Ciocca, 2007; Brandolini and Vecchi, 2013). Wages were, and still are, among the lowest in Europe. According to the European Commission's AMECO database, the GDP wage share, currently 59.4%, was always around 60%, also prior to 2008; it was only lower in Greece and Cyprus. The currency crisis had also inverted the trend towards decreasing income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. A study by Brandolini et al (2018) shows that the double recession − due to the global financial crisis in 2008−09 and the sovereign debt crisis in 2011−13 − did not cause a further increase in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, but rather, general impoverishment. Households’ incomes, in fact, fared even worse than GDP, sliding back to the values of the late 1980s.

The 1992 economic crisis, and the need to adhere to the stringent Maastricht requirements, had also constrained the process of welfare recalibration that had slowly begun (Ferrera et al, 2000; Saraceno, 2017; Negri and Saraceno, 2018), leaving untouched the existing patchy system of social protection and its lack of a national minimum income for the poor: income and unemployment protection skewed towards old and core (mostly male) workers; unbalanced division of solidaristic responsibilities between the family, the state, local governments, the Catholic and other churches, NGOs and charities, depending on who needed protection (core workers with long-term contracts, temporary, mostly young workers, long-term unemployed, disabled people and the frail old, homeless people, recent and less recent migrants); and the historical weakness of social assistance.