I cannot help but notice that these areas are the same where reforms are called for still today for the Italian economy as a whole. In 2003 Riccardo and I wrote two papers on the dismal performance of the Italian economy.
While I was considering a number of structural deficiencies that were risking to have serious consequences on our growth capabilities in the years to come, Riccardo tried to put the unsatisfactory Italian productivity outcome in a hystorical perspective. It is interesting that the titles of our papers had two elements in common: the word “decline” (so popular today) and a question mark.