In the eurozone, only Greece is worse off than us. And this says a lot about the state of difficulty facing our public administration. We refer to the result that emerged from the drafting of the European index on the quality of services offered by public offices in the 19 countries that use the single currency. A processing, referred to 2017, which was carried out by the CGIA on data from the European Commission (the Index of the quality of the Public Administration is the result of a mix of questions posed to citizens regarding the quality of public services, impartiality with which these are awarded and corruption).
And if Finland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg occupy the three steps of the podium, Slovakia, Italy and Greece, however, are sadly placed in the lower part of the ranking.
“However, it would be wrong to generalize, not all of our public administration is of low quality. Healthcare in the North, many sectors of law enforcement, various research centers and universities - says the coordinator of the Paolo Zabeo Studies Office - ensure performances that are unmatched by the rest of Europe. Nonetheless, the overall average level is worrying. The lack of communication, the lack of transparency, legal uncertainty and the overly burdensome obligations have generated a deep rift, especially in the relations between companies and public offices, which has caused the expulsion of many foreign operators who, unfortunately, do not want to more investing in Italy also due to the excessive redundancy of our bureaucratic system ".
And to corroborate the position of those who argue that for the country system it is essential to have a state machine that works well, the data processed by the OECD are also particularly interesting. According to this international organization, in fact, the average labor productivity of Italian companies is higher in areas with more efficient public administration (OECD, “Italian Economic Report”, February 2017).
"Unfortunately, the time and costs of the bureaucracy - says the Secretary of the CGIA Renato Mason - have become a pathology that negatively characterizes a large part of our country. In particular, Italian companies, being mainly of very small size, need an efficient and economically advantageous public service, in which decisions are made without delay and the recipient is able to assess with certainty the duration of the procedures ".
Equally worrisome are the results that emerge from the periodic sample survey conducted by Eurobarometer (European Commission) on the complexity of administrative procedures encountered by 28 entrepreneurs in the Union. Italy is at the 4 ° place of this ranking, with the 84 percent of respondents declaring that bad bureaucracy is a big problem. Only Greece, Romania and France present a situation worse than ours, while the average European Union figure is 60 per cent (Flash Eurobarometer 457, "Businesses' attitudes towards corruption in the EU", december 2017).
If, instead, we return to our elaboration on data of the European Commission, the results that emerge from the comparison on the quality of the Public Administration at the regional level are equally ruthless. Compared to the 192 territories affected by the analysis carried out in the 2017, the main regions of central and southern Italy appear for 8 times in the rank of the worst 20, with Calabria ranking even at the 190 ° place.
As for the national comparison, the final result is an indicator that varies between 100, obtained from the Finnish region Åland (1 ° place), and zero that has "handed" the black shirt to the Bulgarian region of the Severozapaden. Although it is relegated to the 118 ° place at European level, Trentino Alto Adige (index equal to 41,4) is the most virtuous territorial reality of Italy, followed by two other regions of the Northeast: Emilia Romagna and Veneto (index equal to 39,4) that are placed respectively at the 127 ° and at the 128 ° place of the general classification. Immediately below we find Lombardy (38,9) which is at 131 ° place and Friuli Venezia Giulia (38,7) which stands at the 133 ° step of the ranking drawn up by the European Commission.
As we said above, bad, especially the regions of the South where the most worrying performances are recorded. If Campania (index equal to 8,4) is at 186 ° place, Abruzzo (6,2) is at 189 ° and Calabria, the territory where the PA works worst among all our 20 regional realities, is even at 190 ° step of the general ranking, with an index of only 1,8 points.
