Speech by Gianfranco Miccichè
Deputy Minister for Economy and Finance, Italy
This is the first time that the OECD has organised a conference in Palermo or in Sicily, which makes it a
particularly important occasion for us. We are very grateful to the organisers of the conference and to the
OECD Secretariat.
But I have not come to Palermo today just because it is my city. I have come because I regard this
initiative as of fundamental importance for promoting an international exchange of experiences in the
construction and use of sets of indicators in support of public policy.
I have been in politics for a number of years and since taking responsibility in government for
Development Policies I have concentrated almost exclusively on seeking ways of improving the quality of
life in those areas that are still lagging behind in development terms. In other words, on finding ways to
boost job and infrastructure creation, on improving the performance of public services, on finding the best
instruments for helping our small and medium-sized enterprises while avoiding wasting public money and
on evaluating the usefulness or otherwise of public subsidies.
Although I am neither a magician nor a wizard, there is one thing that I do know, and that is that I can
make mistakes and so have a duty to determine as rapidly as possible whether the policies that I
implement produce improvements or disasters. That is why I have always been so enthusiastic about good
indicators which enable me to know what is happening and why.
In Italy, the use of a range of indicators to assess and monitor territorial development has helped to
improve decision-making -- or at least raised people’s awareness of the need for economic policy
decisions to be based on a good knowledge of what is going on. The Department for Development
Policies in the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, which I am honoured to lead, has invested
considerably in recent years in reinforcing its analytical and forecasting capacity in order to impose and
coordinate effective development strategies. Thanks to our collaboration with the national statistics
institute, Istat, we have been able progressively to enrich of our stock of knowledge in support of policy
choices.
Quantitative analysis of territorial socio-economic trends provides the main organs of government
(Parliament, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the office of the President of the Republic) and national and
regional institutions with the information that they need to implement policies tailored as closely as
possible to territorial development needs. Such analysis is combined with detailed examination of the state
of financial implementation of public investments and of the territorial distribution of capital expenditure
needed for efficient planning of public finances.
A fundamental prerequisite for a strategy of competitiveness is the modernisation of public administration.
Active development policies require administration services capable of reinforcing market mechanisms
while at the same time identifying areas where the needs of citizens and business are not satisfied in order
to respond with quality public services.
The corollary of this new strategy is the Italian government’s decision, in a move which marks a
significant departure from the past, to build a system of rules, based on indicators setting intermediate
policy objectives to which are linked mechanisms for a system of rewards and penalties as a means of
promoting the modernisation of public administration.
The introduction of this system of rewards and of a mechanism for competition between institutions,
under the direction and coordination of the Ministry of the Economy, has helped to speed up the
implantation of major administrative reforms, indispensable for raising the quality of public investments
and their impact at territorial level. Using a system of rewards we have been able to define and implement
the necessary rules for the functioning of competitive markets for public services in such areas as water
supply, waste management etc. Thanks to the OECD I was able last year to deliver a report on this topic at
a major international meeting, and it was specifically on this occasion that the importance became clear to
me of guaranteeing mechanisms that give clear measurements of results. We wanted to set difficult targets
for regional authorities: we had an obligation to guarantee the impartiality of our evaluation of results.
Success in this area has prompted the government to extend, during the course of the 2002-2004 cycle,
this application of mechanisms of rewards and penalties to the institutional agreements between the state
and the regions in order to speed up and raise the quality of the whole range of capital expenditure in
under-utilised areas. The implementation of the new system of rewards provides a strong incentive for
improved programming of resources, for the adoption of efficient partnership methods and for the
selection of genuinely effective policy interventions.
The system of territorial statistical data and the set of rules on which the system of rewards is based are
proving to be a powerful instrument for providing incentives at both administrative and political level,
helping to spread institutional innovations and improve the effectiveness of public investments.
This topic will be the subject of discussion here tomorrow, at a session in which Prof. Fabrizio Barca, my
head of department and someone well known to many of you, will be able to provide more extensive and
precise details.
Having got to know the OECD better, I have come to appreciate the very high level of professionalism
and seriousness with which it approaches policy issues. Its work on indicators, the subject of this Forum,
is to my mind one of its most important contributions to the modernisation of Development Policies. For
this reason, I wish you every success in your discussions and in the outcome of this conference, held in a
city which I regard as one of the most beautiful in the world. Thank you.