Italy from economic decline to the current crisis

The objective of this paper is to show that the current global economic crisis in which also Italy fell in 2008 represents indeed for the Italian economy just the last step of a much longer declining path which started in the nineties or to be more precise in 1992-93. In particular, I argue, the reasons which explain the long Italian decline, and partly also the deeper recession today and the lack of recovery from the current crisis can be found in the past reforms of the labour market, and in particular in the labour flexibility introduced in the last 15 years, which had, along with other policies introduced in parallel, cumulative negative consequences on the inequality, on the consumption, on the aggregate demand, on the labour productivity and on the GDP dynamics.