Italy and COVID-19: Winning the war, losing the peace?

摘要

The COVID-19 crisis has found in Italy a very frail patient and an ideal victim: aged and with serious pre-existing conditions. The country entered 2020 with a predicted annual GDP growth of around 0.2 per cent (below the already sluggish average since 2000 of 0.5 per cent). Productivity growth had been anemic since the early 1990s and the public debt had reached, by the end of 2019, a worrying 135 per cent of GDP. The first outbreaks of the virus, in Lombardy and Veneto, hit the country's industrial powerhouse and jeopardised fiscal revenues for the year 2020. Italy's health-care system is organised on a regional basis. The responses of the regions differed. Veneto proved very effective in limiting the outbreak, through aggressive test and tracing. Lombardy did not, and paid a high price for it. Half of Italy's COVID 19-related deaths are concentrated in this region.