Dear Europe… 2009

From 1995 to 2006, Italy accumulated a negative balance of 30.3 billion euros with Europe. In 2007 alone, Italian contributions paid to the EU stood at 13.8 billion euros, placing Italy in third place in terms of incidence on total revenue after Germany (20%) and France (16.9%), but the resources allocated to Italy by the EU were 3.5 billion euros less. Moreover, of the funding received in 2006-2007, the regions of Southern Italy risk losing about 9.3 billion euros due to their inability to implement the appropriate procedures in an extremely bureaucratic system like ours, the lack of networking among local authorities, the lack of widespread information among citizens on the existence of EU funds, and the thousands of loopholes that the recipients of funding have to navigate. This is a figure that would cover a whole budget and makes Italy the least virtuous European countries in this respect.