Italian Central Government Budgeting: Future Hopes and Past Disappointments

Like many Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Italy has been reforming its public administration in recent decades. With an emphasis on "New Public Management", the reform process has redesigned the institutional and organizational structure of the public administration. The start-up of intricate reforms based on a complex set of new laws was basically triggered by overwhelming dissatisfaction with the performance of the Italian public administration, both from a macroeconomic and a social perspective. Against a dynamic and developing socioeconomic backdrop, the Italian public administration wallowed in difficulty, with the most evident symptoms of its problems being the expansion of diseconomies, a mounting public debt, and its virtual incapacity to become a factor in the nation's development. The European unification process and the changes mentioned in the socioeconomic backdrop have fostered a broad reform process aimed at overcoming bureaucratic organizational models, and a situation in which the respect of the formal rules represented the sole criterion for assessing the actions of public officials. Central government budgeting and accounting reforms have been part of the whole picture considered necessary to modernize the state, and it is specifically on these that the chapter focuses on.