The money spent on the Pnrr
Of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, only 6% of funding has been spent and only 1% of projects have been completed. Furthermore, 65% of the projects pass through the Municipalities and 60% of these it has fewer than 5 thousand inhabitants, with considerable difficulty in managing the projects themselves. The data emerge from the study conducted by the Pnrr Observatory of The European House – Ambrosetti.
The survey began in April 2021 and continued with the aim of monitoring, 2 years after its launch, the implementation of the Plan, the trend of investments and evaluate the impact of the Pnrr on the reduction of inequalities. And so the level of financial implementation of the Pnrr as at 31 December 2022 is 6%. A very low percentage almost two years after the launch of the Plan. Given the accumulated delay, the new planning of the Pnrr foresees a shift forward of over 20 billion euros of expenses originally foreseen for the three-year period 2020-2022 (-49.7%). The delay, to be recovered as early as 2023, provides for an acceleration compared to the initial programming of over 5 billion euros.
In 2023 there will be 96 conditions (between goals and objectives) to be achieved in the year (27 by June, 69 by December). Based on the report on the implementation status of the Court of Auditors’ Plan, 27 conditions out of 96 (28%) of 2023 have been launched and only one goal has been achieved in these first three months (the one relating to the purchase of data science professional services). Evaluating instead the number of financed and implemented projects, to date, only 1% has been completely concluded, therefore only 2,037 projects out of 171,610.
The projects of the Pnrr
“A collective effort is essential for a decisive change of course, catching up with delays and seizing the unique opportunity that Next Generation EU offers – said Valerio De Molli CEO of Ambrosetti -. Taking into account that 65% of the PNRR projects is in the hands of the Municipalities and that 70% of Italian Municipalities have less than 5 thousand inhabitants, it is necessary to reflect on their spending and project management capacity”.
As far as the business world is concerned, however, the Pnrr represents a great opportunity, but still little known. In the survey carried out with the members of the Ambrosetti Club, more than half of the respondents among the entrepreneurs involved (52.2%) did not participate in any tender of the Pnrr. Two thirds of the respondents declared that they had encountered difficulties in participating in the tenders, difficulties related for 45% to the technical criteria, for 30% to the complexity in interpreting the tender and for 18% to the timing for the application. For 46% of the interviewees, the criteria for awarding tenders remain critical.