Achieving the goal of spending all Pnrr money by 2026 “will be next to impossible”. Criticism of the plan comes from the Cgia de Mestre, according to which if Italy does not manage to spend the annual quota of EU cohesion funds, equal to 9 billion euros, it will hardly be able to use the Pnrr funds that are equal to 4, 5 times that, 42 billion a year on average, 191.5 in total. The Cgia Study Office recalls “the historical difficulty of our country in using all the money that arrives from Brussels”. With regard to cohesion funds, “there are quite a few that refer to the seven-year period 2014-2020 that, by the end of this year, we run the risk of losing, although the hypothetical annual expenditure necessary to allocate all available resources on the ground amounts to just 9 billion euros. Approaching the Pnrr with the same approach that we have just illustrated, between 2023 and 2026 we will have to disburse an average of 42 billion euros per year to be able to carry out all the projects foreseen in the plan. value, the latter, 4.5 times higher than the former.It is evident that achieving this objective will be almost impossible.
The CGIA Studies Office has carefully analyzed the use of EU funds. Of the 64.8 billion euros of European cohesion funds made available to Italy in the period 2014-2020, of which 17 million in national co-financing, just under half (29.8 billion) has yet to be spent. “If we don’t do it by the end of this year, the unused portion will have to be returned. This is yet another demonstration that our country struggles a lot to spend the money made available to us by the EU within the established deadlines. If, on the other hand, we succeed, in purely theoretical terms it is as if we had spent 9 billion euros every year for these seven years. With the Pnrr, however, between 2021 and 2026 we will have to invest 191.5, equivalent to an average expenditure that allows the global use of 42 billion euros per year in the period 2023-2026. If we are struggling to put 9 billion EU funds a year on the ground, how are we going to spend even 42 billion on Pnrr, or 4.5 times as much?” the CGI report.
According to the Bank of Italy, for an average investment of 300 thousand euros, in our country the average duration for the construction of a work is 4 years and 10 months. The design phase lasts just over 2 years (equivalent to 40% of the total duration), the assignment of works lasts 6 months and more than 2 years are required for execution and testing. For an investment of five million euros, the construction period is 11 years. Numbers that speak for themselves.
Source: IL Tempo

Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.