The most famous store in the world is probably Harrods (London), The most famous shopping street is Fifth Avenue in Newyork and for Fashion, Paris is more chic and trendy. Nice try in making things up.
0.9 % is good for a developed world? Dude almost every country in Europe is growing faster than you. You might want to read certain articles about the situation in Italy. Your unemployment rates are one of the highest in Europe. In terms of being corrupt, you are even lower than Malaysia on the Corruption list.
http://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/blog-italy-g7-member-and-third-world-country/
Italy is the EU laggard in terms of productivity, but at the same time it retains a strong performance in manufacturing, registering the third best trade surplus in Europe. How can this paradox be explained? What are the roots of these problems and where is the potency of the country concentrated? Italian journalist Maria Maggiore of Investigate Europe gives her vision of the Bel Paese.
After 20 years spent abroad, the first thing that shocked me on returning to Italy was the extreme bureaucracy that crept into everyday life.
We spent five months to get an identity card. I had to go back to the office three times to receive a national ID number for our kids, as each their first names contained some mistake. Plus, for every document, we had to fill in and sign dozens of forms. At school, it’s the same: papers over papers. I thought: how is it possible that such a wealthy state – we are the eighth in the league of the leading economies – behaves like a third world country?
Now, I read the latest World Economic Forum’s
Global Competitiveness Report 2017-2018 and my doubts are even bigger.
The famous Geneva think tank, which organises the well-known Davos days yearly, studied the economic situation of 137 economies worldwide. It didn’t focus on the richest countries, but only those where data were available.
The conclusions for Italy are terrifying.
In terms of
productivity – which scores on 114 indicators that includes infrastructure, education, politics, macroeconomics figures, public services, and innovation – we are at
the 43th position, the last of all “old” Europe states, right after Portugal, and overtaken by countries such as Chili, Azerbaijan
, Thailand, Poland or Malaysia.
Italians occupy the 126th position for the highest taxation in the world. This is the most tax payers in Italy can do, while tax evasion hits 100 billion euros a year, according to Istat. All the while, the country ranks 120th for credit access and third from the bottom for capacity to attract foreign investments.
Add to that the country’s enormous public debt – 133,1% of GDP – and its ranking in the World Economic Forum report on banks stability, namely the 116th, and that the picture is painfully clear.
Reforming the State should be the priority number one of all politicians in Italy, one would think. Policy-makers could very well try to lighten a pachyderm of laws and bureaucratic constraints.
But instead, the current government spent all summer talking about immigration, namely how to discourage NGOs from rescuing people in the Mediterranean; striking (if confirmed ) agreements with
Libyan militias to keep migrants in Libya, no matter what future will hold for these people; and approving a very strict law on vaccines that now forces all citizens to get at least ten vaccines. The latter policy threatens to turn away unvaccinated children at school gates. In Europe, the obligation exists only in former ex-Soviet Union countries.
UK and Italy are not in the same league in most categories.
