Undeclared work, tax evasion, and illegal activities such as drug dealing, prostitution and smuggling remain the great scourges: Italy is taking action on cannabis and the caporalato system.
Undeclared work, tax evasion and illegal activities continue to be a scourge for Italy, first and foremost, obviously, on a social level. But from an economic standpoint too, the repercussions are increasingly severe: Istat calls it the "non-observed economy" (which combines the shadow economy with the economy made up of properly illegal activities) and, as such, it is impossible to produce official figures, but the estimate is that all these out-of-control activities account for 211 billion euros a year, a figure that would represent 13 per cent of gross domestic product.
Almost half of these 211 billion, notes Istat on the basis of data relating to 2014, derive from income declarations artificially deflated not so much by private individuals as by economic operators: companies, hotels and restaurant owners above all. Sharply on the rise (at 36.5 per cent of the total) is income from irregular work — that is, without a contract: there are more than three and a half million such workers, employed in particular in services, but also in agriculture, retail, catering and construction. In other words: farm labourers, shop assistants, waiters, factory workers and labourers. But undeclared rent — to university students, for example — also weighs heavily: 8 per cent of the total. Then there are the properly illegal activities: drugs, prostitution, smuggling. A market worth 17 billion, one per cent of GDP, and decidedly far more complicated to tackle.
On the subject of undeclared work, an important step could come from the application of the law to combat the phenomena of undeclared work, the exploitation of labour in agriculture (the so-called caporalato) and wage realignment in the agricultural sector, which the Chamber of Deputies has only just begun to examine. But repression is not the only avenue for the Italian parliament, which is for instance waiting to begin discussing the possibility of legalising the sale of cannabis, which according to its supporters (found on both the right and the left) could allow the state to recover up to 8 of those 17 billion.
