800 billion Euros per year. And if he said it Mario Draghi in his impeccable Oxford English and with his long militancy in the ECB, you have to believe it: it can be done. But the reaction of the various European governments grappling with budget problems, with an unhappy decline, with consequences that are nothing short of catastrophic from the green policy pursued by the Commission and transformed into a collective suicide for the automotive sector, has not been as exhilarating and enthusiastic as perhaps the former Prime Minister expected.
The Taxpayer-Paid Infrastructure Disaster
And there is an emblematic sector, that of transport infrastructures in which public investment supported by European Structural Funds (always paid by citizens of the Union) and by the recent bonanza called PNRR, has rapidly transformed into a bottomless pit, and a methodical dispersion of the few resources that today they would like to channel into a double Marshall Plan.
Well, in the infrastructure sector, what has been almost totally lacking is not so much creative finance, but rather alternative finance, already successfully tested in rare cases in the past, to finance major works by drawing not on public coffers but on the financial market and formulas that have become obsolete without being used as the project finance, “pay per use” which survives only in the Anglo-Saxon tradition (There must be a reason why they left the European Union) and the dear old beloved tolls.
In Ancient Rome, “pay per use” was in force
Yet it would be enough to leaf back through the pages of a history book to discover that he had invented these formulas. ancient Rome, precisely to finance transport infrastructures: the famous consular roads were financed through extra revenue fueled by the owners of the land and lands bordering or crossed by these roads and who therefore benefited from the advantages of more efficient mobility for their crops and their production, and not only agricultural. Even the definition of purpose taxes (in recent days we have reported on the one that the Republic of Genoa imposed on prostitutes, to pay for the construction of docks and port wharves) was very clear to the rulers of Rome, whether they were a Republic or an Empire: or with a precise percentage of the customs revenue that was allocated to the construction of bridges and roads identified in advance. Or with the issuance of silver coins of which a significant portion was “reserved” – so to speak – for landowners who benefited from the new mobility and therefore paid for it.
With the exception of the Anglo-Saxon world, where the model “pay per use” (the infrastructure is paid for by those who use it) and the investment trusts that were and are fed by these financing methods, Europe and, obviously, Italy, have transformed history into a collective oblivion. With the result that today, the former president of the ECB discovers the need for a Marshall Plan, or rather two, to relaunch the Union.
The first and only private terminal in La Spezia
Yet some less dated examples could be taken as an example for a different infrastructure policy. Today the Port Community of La Spezia he recalled (with a polemical note on the ideas circulating in these hours of a large plan for the privatization of the ports) how the former military port of eastern Liguria has become one of the main container ports of the country, only because a private entrepreneur, Angelo Ravano (with his Contship) had designed, financed and built the terminal that still today represents one of the models of excellence; and this without asking for public money but only a long-term state concession, issued on the basis of an industrial plan that would allow the private individual to recover the investment and produce profits.
In a normal world this example should have made converts in other ports, but the exact opposite happened and the public hand took on the responsibility not only of financing terminals, but also of making mistakes in this financing, then entrusting private individuals with the task of recovering an economically logical sense: it happened in Gioia Tauro built to serve a steelmaking center never realized; it was repeated at Voltri, designed for a coal that never arrivedand both transformed into profitable container terminals precisely because of these planning errors that cost the taxpayer dearly. All this in a climate of constant demonization of the private sector on the docks.
A Highway Fund for the Brenner Railway
Even in the motorway world, the concession formula (construction and management) was conceived so that the concessionaire would allocate a significant portion of toll profits to the maintenance and development of the network, only to then spiral into a vortex of controversy, culminating in the collapse of the Morandi bridge. And in the case of the A22, commonly known as Autobrennero, the concession provides for the allocation of part of the profits to a Fund for the financing of the Brenner railway tunnel. But even in this case, which envisaged a real “purpose tax”, on the eve of the renewal of the concession for another 50 years and with the current concessionaire having a right of pre-emption, it seems that no one wants to clarify this small and not marginal detail.
Yet it would be enough to cross the border into neighbouring Switzerland to discover that it is not so difficult to remove transport infrastructure from the great public or para-public trough: the largest railway infrastructure project of Switzerland, based on the Alpine Convention and therefore on the choice to transfer increasingly large shares of freight traffic from roads to rail, was financed mainly by a tax on road haulage. To put it simply: truck drivers paid for the train so that it could compete with their companies.
Switzerland wants to introduce Alpine toll
And the idea of financing works with specific taxes and tolls is also gaining ground in other European countries. To cover the high costs of construction and maintenance of transalpine infrastructure works, neighboring countries have already introduced a system of ad hoc tolls in addition to the normal motorway tolls: Austria for the Brenner motorway and the Arlberg tunnelFrance for the Mont Blanc and Fréjus motorway tunnels. The only Italian case, that of the Great St. Bernard tunnel, needless to say, is at the centre of an international mess with the Canton of Vaud and the Swiss component asking the Italian company to pay off its debts and threatening on several occasions to close the tunnel.
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