Italy: the eurozone’s weakest link

Italy's economy is almost totally paralysed. It has barely expanded since 199; debt has reached an unsustainable 130% of GDP; and political instability has thwarted serious reform efforts to revive the economy.

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Anti-euro populists are ahead in the polls
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Ten years ago the head of Italy's industry association, Luca di Montezemolo, made a speech outlining ten urgent structural reforms that businesses wanted the government to enact, notably a reduction in red tape and a lower tax burden."I could give that same speech today," he recently told The Wall Street Journal. That's Italy's problem in a nutshell: almost total paralysis.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.