“Giving up part of the Pnrr is a mistake”. Cottarelli speaks

“Starting to say ‘we can’t do it’ right away is the surest way to fail.” To talk about Pnrr Carlo Cottarelli, accountant, former director of fiscal affairs of the IMF, now independent senator in Pd share, starts from this obvious consideration, but now not even so much. In recent days, Tito Boeri and Roberto Perotti broke the “taboo of renunciation” also on the left, considering the Northern League’s idea of abandon at least a portion of the Pnrr loans in debt, about 162 of the 191 billion requested by our country until 2026. “It’s not an absurd idea but it doesn’t convince me”, the professor pressed. “On the Pnrr at the moment there are two separate questions: the first concerns the ability of this government and, more generally, of the Italian public administration to implement the plan, the second is whether it is a good thing to do so because, as some say , many projects are useless or of little use. The political reasoning of those who push for a renunciation start from these two considerations”. And they don’t convince him. “I’ll explain why right away,” he says. “The argument that is used is this: thus one gets into debt for non-essential works, but one forgets to say that that debt depends on the deficit established to boost the economy, once that deficit is fixed not spending on those things would mean debt financing something else, but the loan terms of the Pnrr are very advantageoushave a much lower interest rate than the market rate, this also means another thing: being able to carry out less profitable projects because they are financed at a cost two percentage points lower”.