LUHNIP – TACKLING STATE (IN)CAPACITY IN THE CONTEXT OF ITALY’S RECOVERY AND RESILIENCE PLAN

After a past decade of austerity in Europe, the Next Generation EU has recently provided an abundance of financial resources for member states to implement investments aimed at stimulating economic growth, promoting social inclusion and the green and digital transition. Yet, two years into the implementation of its National Resilience and Recovery Fund (RRF), Italy is struggling to keep pace with the execution of the investments envisaged by the plan, especially regarding those investments whose execution is the responsibility of subnational governments. This is particularly problematic for a country in dire need to reverse two decades of fiscal austerity and declining public investments.

The project aims to study the determinants of state (in)capacity of the Italian bureacracy in the context of the National Resilience and Recovery Fund. The objective is, put simply, to

understand the reasons why subnational administrators in Italy fail to plan and execute public investments and, accordingly, to propose a very concrete set of measures that could be adopted to strengthen Italy’s institutional capacity to implement investments and industrial policy in the future.