Italy has been promised €200 billion from the EU, but struggling to find ways to spend the money

Rome: Italy is indeed struggling to spend the €191 billion it secured from the European Union through the Recovery Fund, an unprecedented €672-billion programme launched in 2020 to help member states get back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Italy obtained the largest portion of those funds, but the country is now running behind due to its elephantine bureaucracy, limited human resources, and a general administrative and political system unfit to manage such a vast task.

Although widely reported by the media and public spending watchdogs, Italy’s difficulties in managing the Recovery Fund’s resources became undeniable on March 27. That’s when the European Commission decided to postpone by a month the disbursement of the third installment of the plan, worth €19 billion, in order to have more time to assess whether the country satisfied all the conditions required to unlock the funds.

The following day, the National Court of Auditors published its biannual progress report for the “National Recovery and Resilience Plan” (PNRR), the document which details how Italy plans to spend the funds received from the EU, listing all the scheduled reforms and investments.