Even the “debt rule”, which calls on countries to reduce by 1/20th annually the amount by which their debt exceeds the threshold of 60 per cent of GDP, in fact renders operational a requirement already embodied in the Treaty of Maastricht.
For Italy, compliance would not entail the adoption of a permanently restrictive budget policy stance, but it does imply the return to a stable growth path and it requires a faster pace of adjustment to the geopolitical, technological and demographic changes of the past thirty years.