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Corporate tax breaks and help to buy homes: Italy’s ‘growth decree’ to fight recession

Italy's populist government unveiled its battle plan on Wednesday in the fight to boost sluggish growth in the eurozone's third biggest economy.

Published: 24 April 2019 20:25 CEST

Corporate tax breaks and help to buy homes: Italy's 'growth decree' to fight recession

The growth decree contains measures designed to benefit young Italians, including graduates and house-buyers. Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP

From corporate tax deductions to financial schemes aimed at stopping the country's brain drain, the coalition is scrabbling to reverse poor forecasts after Italy slid into a technical recession in the second half of 2018.

The so-called “growth decree” adopted by the hard-right League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement allocates €1.9 billion over three years to the measures, which focus mainly on companies.

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It prolongs tax breaks on investments in machinery and real estate, while reducing corporate taxes. It also earmarks some €500 million for municipalities, to be used on energy-saving projects or to shore up public buildings in seismic areas.

Young Italians get a hand with purchasing their first home, graduates who have headed abroad are offered financial incentives to return, and the government also plans to compensate savers hit by the failure of small regional banks.

“We are giving a strong boost to the country's economic recovery, with concrete measures to support businesses and investments,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Facebook.

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Govt source says Italy considering 'reciprocal plan' to swap refugees with US

“A reciprocal plan is currently being studied, according to which the US would host refugees present in Libya who want to go to Europe,” a source in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s office said.

At the same time, “some European Mediterranean states would host a few dozen South American refugees”, the source said.

The source was responding to a report by CBS News in the United States, which suggested that President Joe Biden’s administration was also in talks with Greece.

CBS said refugees would be selected at immigration offices set up by the United States last year in four Latin American countries.

It said 500 people could be sent both to Italy and Greece, though the source in Meloni’s office said that figure was “completely misleading”.

Rome is looking to accept “about 20 Venezuelan refugees of Italian origin” who would be able to work in Italy, the source said.

The plan would be “very advantageous for Italy and the European states of first arrival”, the source said, without elaborating.

A separate source at Italy’s interior ministry said Rome would “never assent to the relocation of hundreds of people on its national territory in view of its already considerable efforts in receiving migrants”.

In Athens, Greek migration minister Dimitris Kairidis dismissed the report.

“The CBS report is untrue. There is neither an agreement nor a request from the US to resettle legal immigrants in Greece,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

More than 2.4 million migrants crossed the southern US border in 2023 alone, largely from Central America and Venezuela, as they flee poverty, violence and natural disasters exacerbated by climate change.

Meanwhile Italy is among the first ports of call for migrants crossing from North Africa into Europe, recording almost 160,000 irregular arrivals by boat across the central Mediterranean last year.

Meloni’s government has made stopping irregular migration into Italy a priority.

It has sought to speed up asylum processing requests while signing new deals with departure countries.

It has also tried to deter migrants by setting up a new processing centre in Albania and limiting the activities of charities that operate rescue boats in the Mediterranean Sea.

Nearly 21,000 migrants have landed on Italy’s shores so far this year, compared to more than 50,000 in the same period last year, according to government data.

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