Much more needs to be done, for sure. But the progress is not negligible. The OECD assessed that these reforms made the Italian market as open as the EU average today, despite remaining obstacles at local at regional level. These reforms are expected to bring 4% additional growth over a decade. This is macro-economically relevant.

Structural reforms are important because they lay the foundation for future growth. But also because they bring more equity and more justice to the economy. The Bundes president underlined the World competition, the fact of competition, the virtuous of competition so much of the structure reforms that all our counties are embarked upon really boils down to enhancing competition, to reduce the advantages of the insiders relative to the disadvantages of those lying out in the cold normally youth, normally unemployed, and even more frequently youth and unemployed

Unfortunately, short termism also exists in European politics. I did see short terms in the initial European response to the crisis. For instance when we insisted that each Member State had of course to clean up the mess in front of its own house and we failed – however - to recognize that the crisis had a systemic component. This slowness means the crisis ultimately became a crisis of confidence in the euro area’s ability to solve its problems and in the euro itself. It was a hard but very challenging fight intellectually and politically, for example, to convince my colleagues the head of governments of Nordic European countries that of course one had to do its homework as Italy was desperately doing, desperately but with hope of course doing. But the moment that there is a market less than total faith in the Euro and its integrity as was the case one year ago, than of course it is not enough that each country does its homework diligently because there is a systemic component, a risk factor in the Euro itself. And of course it’s only natural that reflects more than proportionally in heavy manner on those counties witch, like my country, although recognized as been doing the right policies as to bear on their shoulders a very high stock of debt because of inhering policies.