Happy Birthday EURO – Thanks to you Italian People Lost 74.000 euro

The German Research Center CEP - Center for European Policy of Freiburg (www.cep.eu) - has recently published an interesting analysis on the 20 years of euro history entitled “20 Years of the Euro: Winners and Losers”.

Since we have adopted the new European currency, Italians has lost 73,605 euro, while Germans has won 23,116 euro. Thus, Germany gain the gold medal, while Italy got the last place of the race. This are the results of CEP study which has compared eight Eurozone-countries (Germany, Netherland, Greece, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, France, and Italy) to evaluate the real impact of Euro in the national European economies. Thus, the study, focusing on the per-capita GDP of each country, has analyzed the trend of this index without the euro, under the assumption that the countries could have kept the control on their economic policy.

In 2017, for instance, German GDP rose by 280 billion euros and GDP per capita by 3.390. Italy has lost more than everyone. Without the euro, the CEP scholars calculate, the GDP of Rome would have been higher than 530 billion euros, which corresponds to 8,756 euros per capita. In France too, the euro led to significant economic losses of € 374 billion, corresponding to € 5,570 per capita.

Greece and Italy, in particular, are going through a hard difficulty because of the fact that they are not able to devalue their currency anymore. This has led that their products are not so competitive in the international market. As the study states, “in the decades prior to introduction of the euro, Italy regularly devalued its currency for this purpose. After the introduction of the euro, that was no longer possible. Instead, structu creasing losses in prosperity”. The figures below are showing the opposite negative and positive trend of Italian and Spanish per-capita GDP due to their more or less ability to renovate and change their economic policy.

 

Looking at the CEP study from a political perspective we can say also that this incapacity of Italy to find a way to become competitive within the Eurozone has produced and raised the skepticism on the European Union among Italians which will risk to impact irrevocably the next European Election results on May 2019.

Italy

Spain