The fact that Italy is among only three countries that have already received four installments does not necessarily mean that it is the country furthest along in implementing its Pnrr. This is because not all member states will receive the money from the EU for their Pnrrs divided into ten installments by June 2026, as Italy has agreed. There Spain agreed to disburse the funds in ten installments (at the beginning there were eightthen rose after a new agreement with the EU), as Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia And Slovenia; Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland in nine installments; Estonia And Hungary in seven installments; Denmark, Finland, Latvia And Malta in six installments; France, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands And Sweden in five installments. Therefore comparisons cannot be made only on the basis of the number of installments paid.
In the new “Annual Report for 2023”, published on 31 May, the Bank of Italy he compared the percentages of money paid by the EU to the various member states on the total value of their plans. To date, Italy has collected 52.7 percent of its Pnrr: this percentage is not the highest of all. In first place is Denmark (59.3 percent) followed by France (58.1 percent) and Italy.
Beyond the installments paid and the money received, the implementation of the Pnrr must also be evaluated on the basis of the ability to spend European resources. Here the comparison between European countries becomes more difficult because the EU Commission does not provide comparable data. Even if we focus only on Italy, transparency on the data on the spending of PNRR money is limited. As we explained in the past, our country has been known to spend money more slowly than originally intended. The same delays on spending had been cited by Meloni in the autumn of 2022, shortly before the inauguration of his government, to criticize the Draghi government and the management of the Pnrr.
Until the end of 2023 Italy had spent 43 billion euros for the plan: approximately 43 percent of the money collected by the EU so far (less than half) and 22 percent of all the resources the Pnrr can count on (just over a fifth). Almost 28 billion, however, were used for tax incentives, in particular for the construction Superbonus and Industry 4.0 (a plan that encourages technological innovation in companies). These are investments born before the Pnrr, the financing of which was then partly included in the plan. By removing this expenditure from that achieved so far, we obtain 15 billion euros, an expenditure equal to approximately 15 percent of the over 102 billion collected by our country.
In general, since the launch of the plan, Italy has accumulated delays in spending. For example, the third report on the implementation of the PNRR, published by the government in June 2023, he had predicted spending just under 34 billion euros for the whole of last year. The data says that we are about 14 billion euros behind. In 2024, 2025 and 2026, Italy will thus still have to spend around 151 billion euros, on average over 50 billion euros per year, more than what has been spent so far between 2021 and 2023.
