The Italian Economy Has Been Stagnant for So Long?

Two of our listeners specifically ask, independently of each other, for an explanation of why italy's economy has been so stagnant. We really should do an entire episode about this, because stagnant economies are fascinating and alarming. It is clearly some combination of deep structural issues and shocks from the outside, and the two compounding each other. Ase you can't mis people, you know, enwards the growing of the cake. You can't shuffle distributional issues into general expansion. None of that works in the italian case currently. So where do those problems come from?