Brussels, 13/07/2001 (Agence Europe) - Italy's Minister of the Economy, Giulio Tremonti has written to the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Pedro Solbes, confirming that his government intended to respect the commitments stemming from the EU's Broad Economic Policy Guidelines. Given the worse than expected budgetary balance (see yesterday's EUROPE, p.13), Italy will take the appropriate corrective measures.
The Commissioner's spokesperson said that Italy's budgetary commitments provides for a deficit of 0.8 of national product in 2001, 0.5% in 2002 and budgetary balance in 2003. Should growth be inferior to predictions for reasons outside the control of national policy (for example, repercussions of the world economic slowdown on the euro zone), the automatic stabilising mechanisms render certain reasonable excesses to the forecasted deficits possible. But those countries that still have debts largely in excess of the Maastricht criteria (and so far that is Italy's case) have a limited margin of maneouvre. Italy will soon be forwarding detailed accounts of the first semester to Brussels, and it is in September that it will be possible to proceed with a detailed analysis of the situation and of the corrective measures that meanwhile will have been defined in Rome.