Abstract
The book encompasses thirty years of Italian politics and policy-making through the study of budgetary policy. In Italy, the budget is still a political document, with the power of the purse currently all in the government’s hands. Institutional frictions, although slackened, continue to restrain changes and punctuations show no sign of reduction, a clear sign of actors’ bounded rationality, who lack a long-term conception about how to manage the budget policy and ideas on which functions the budget exerts. The multilayered and collective decision-making process implemented through the strengthening of European economic governance appears currently the most effective tool for a functional budget policy. Frictions are particularly evident in times of crisis, but if decision-makers are able to take advantage of the window of opportunity that opens up in those moments, even the most severe crisis can stimulate profound reforms and give new life-blood to the whole political system.
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Notes
- 1.
Camera, Comm. V Bilancio, res. sed. 20/12/2020, p. 38.
- 2.
V. Camera, Assemblea, res sten. sed. 22/12/2020, p. 2 (Fassina). During the budgetary session of the 2021 manovra, the Chamber was examining the budget while the Senate analysed the ‘anti-Covid’ decree-law, with the agreement that neither of them would modify what was written in the document on which the other Chamber was working (Marro 2020).
- 3.
‘Dal mammut all’assalto continuo’, Lavoce.info, 20/12/2012, viewed 16/01/2020, https://www.lavoce.info/archives/3781/legge-finanziaria-iva-irpef-governo-monti-elezioni/.
- 4.
This is especially true after the constitutional reform with L. 1/2012, that is, the Fiscal Compact and other reforms (e.g. L. 196/2009) that wanted to leave aside micro-sectional and circumscribed dispositions and demand ordinary legislation for specific decisions on single expenditures to carry out policies decided in the budget (Bergonzini 2021).
- 5.
Interview with Dr Chiara Bergonzini (6/12/2019, own translation).
- 6.
More precisely, some of the PD senators resorted to the Constitutional Court because of the extreme shrinking of the timing accorded to the Chambers for the analysis of the budget: a matter that basically concerns the conflict of powers between branches of the state. With a judgement that raised a few doubts and critiques by experts of parliamentary and constitutional law (among others Bergonzini [2019]; Caterina [2019]; Di Cosimo [2019]; Curreri [2019]), the Court stated that despite ‘the contraction of the parliamentary session that became necessary because of specific contextual demands, stabilised parliamentary practices, and new procedural rules […] that hastened the works at the Senate, also because of the need to avoid the provisional budget as specified in the Constitution and to respect the European limits’ (own translation), art. 72 of the Constitution cannot be evoked in contrast to the prerogatives of each Chamber, whose constitutional autonomy is guaranteed by the Constitution itself (sent. 17/2019).
- 7.
Here, we refer to personal income taxes especially on low- and medium-income earners, not to wealth, inheritance, estate and other kind of taxes, nor to taxes on very high incomes.
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Cavalieri, A. (2023). Conclusion. In: Italian Budgeting Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15447-8_8
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