Italy has 114 infringement procedures open with the EU: the Italian Lower House opened an inquiry

“When the Union intervenes with a regulatory intervention, the ability of implementing and adopting European laws in a timely manner has a remarkable importance. Dealing with this, it is necessary to underline that our country has always performed poorly, as the remarkable number of infringement procedures opened by the European Commission against our country shows. They were 114 as per 23 April 2014.” These are the reasons why the Committee for the European Union Policies of the Lower House decided to open an inquiry on the implementation and the effect of EU policies in Italy.

The explanations of the Committee are filled with several critical remarks: with regard to the management of structural and investment funds, “our country experiences perhaps the most significant and alarming difficulties,” with reference to both the programming capacity and the timely and effective use of the resources allocated by the balance of the Union. The Committee of the Lower House underlined that “unlike other Member States, Italy does not seem to have succeeded in using the funds from the cohesion policy to fill its gaps in the development of large areas of the country and to streamline its productive system.”

With regard to the public finance and macroeconomic rules, the report acknowledged that Italy has undertaken a path for consolidating public finances and for boosting growth and employment, which has brought about positive results – even though some rigidities and procyclical constraints of the European laws represented an obstacle.

“Broadly speaking, our Country does not seem to have seized in full the opportunity, given by the contextualisation of political and legislative decisions of the Union into strategic and programmatic frames, of overcoming both fragmentation and the lack of a medium- and long-term perspective, which are vexing the national political system.”

The deadline for this inquiry has been set on 30 November 2014. As per its objectives, “we need to verify, on one side, the adequacy of implementation procedures for single laws and to evaluate whether – and to which degree – the political and legislative action of Italy contributes to the realisation of strategic targets of European policies. On the other side, it is clearly useful to examine the effect of European policies on the economic, social and institutional system of our country.”

Namely, this inquiry is supposed to verify the proper functioning of the existing tools for adopting and implementing European policies and to propose possible interventions, even of legislative nature, required to enrich the effectiveness of European policies into our set of rules.