John Prideaux
speaker
21 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2011
last heard Dec 2011
John Prideaux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The answer to that is yes and no, really.
In some ways, Italy hasn't been profligate over the last few years, particularly compared with a country like the UK.
If you look at the government finances, Italy actually ran a primary surplus, that's before debt payments are taken into account, from 1992 right up until the financial crisis hit.
Britain, meanwhile, ran rather large deficits.
That said, Italy's government does spend an awful lot and spends it quite wastefully.
And in that, it does have rather a lot in common with Greece.
I think fundamentally the frippery is like lots of government ministers having cars.
While irritating to Italians are not the root cause, but it's really they're symptomatic of a country that's lived beyond its means really for rather too long.
Italy hasn't really grown for the past decade.
When I was doing research for the special report for The Economist, I spent a lot of time standing out in the street in Milan getting rained on and wondering why it was taking such a long time for a taxi to come and pick me up.
And so I became rather fascinated with the market for taxis in Italy and in Milan in particular.
And taxis are really interesting because they typify, in a way, a problem with Italy and with its labor market.
There was a study done that showed that in Milan in 2003, the cost of a taxi badge, so the kind of official license to be a taxi driver in Milan, was 200,000 euros.
In Florence in 2006, it was 300,000 euros to become a taxi driver.
And essentially what happens is the number of taxi driving permits is held down for the benefit of the people who have them already.
And then when they retire, they sell them on to someone else and it acts as their sort of pension pot.
And so as a result, there's a strong incentive built into the system not to create more jobs for taxi drivers.
And the result of that is a shortage of taxi drivers and frustrated journalists like me standing in the rain getting soaked.
If you multiply that across an economy, you get high unemployment and a system that favors insiders who do very nicely from these arrangements and are able to sort of protect their wages and have a comfortable retirement system.
and outsiders who are doing very badly out of this arrangement.
Showing 1–20 of 21 · page 1 of 2
Next →