By YUVAL ROSENBERG, The Fiscal Times, May 1, 2013
Italians have tasted plenty of pain over the past few years. Italy’s unemployment rate, now near a two-decade high at 11.5 percent, has been above 10 percent for 14 months straight. Even after finally swearing in a new coalition government, the prospects for real structural reforms may be slim.
“The recession in Italy is one of the deepest in the eurozone and so far there are hardly any signs of a recovery,” Fitch Ratings said Wednesday. “Furthermore, the medium-term potential growth rate of the Italian economy is low even by European standards.” Fitch estimated that growth potential at around 1 percent. The near-term outlook is worse, as Italy’s economy is set to shrink 1.8 percent this year, according to a recent forecast from Moody’s Investors Service…….The tough economic times have made pizza an increasingly popular food option in Italy, where, according to Italian business group FIPE, some 25,000 pizzerias with 240,000 workers rack up sales of about 9 billion euros (nearly $12 billion) a year. Italian pizzerias need 6,000 more skilled pizzamakers, “but despite the crisis and unemployment it is hard to find them,”……"The Italian mindset is that being a pizza-maker is humiliating, it is a manual labor job," he told the newspaper. "Young Italians want to own 40,000 euro cars and wear nice clothes but they are not prepared to work for it.” To Read More….
My Take - It must be Germany's fault.
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