[autom.vertaling] De commentaren van commissaris Pedro Solbes over de begroting van 2004 van Italië (en)

Commissioner Solbes said :

"The Commission will give its full assessment of the 2004 budget and the medium term objectives of the Italian budgetary policy only after a full and thorough assessment of the measures in the framework of the stability programme assessment exercise due to be presented later this year.

As an initial reaction, budgetary developments in Italy, like elsewhere in Europe, have been negatively influenced by the worse than expected slow down in the first half of the year. On the other hand, the available evidence suggests that the prospects for a moderate recovery in the second half of the year are improving. The government' deficit objectives for 2003 and 2004 are below the 3% reference value and this is encouraging. So is the fact that the government is proposing that around 1/3 of the budgetary package consist of structural measures.

But this should not conceal the fact that the reliance on one-off measures is still very large and this entails important risks for the execution of the budget and for the future. The improvement of the cyclically adjusted budget position is only marginal this year and next year, according to the governments' plan, it will fall short of the 0.5% of GDP objective set by the Council of Ministers. In view of the very high debt to GDP level this is of particular concern.

In fact, the path for debt reduction is even less ambitious than envisaged in last year's stability programme. This is in contrast with the Ecofin Opinion on 21 January 2003 on the Italian stability programme, which clearly stated that "the pace of debt reduction should be significantly faster".