Budgeting, Accounting, Reporting, and Their Reform in Italy

This Chapter presents the key features of Italian government budgeting, accounting, and reporting systems, describes their evolution over time, and discusses possible future developments. Four main phases are identified: (i) traditional arrangements, put in place soon after the country’s unification was achieved in 1861; (ii) the introduction of programme budgeting in the 1970s; (iii) the deployment of NPM-inspired reforms in the 1990s; and (iv) the focus on harmonization, consolidation, and austerity as guided by EU directives and regulations in the 2010s. Each phase is described in terms of the prevailing functions that government accounting was expected to perform (financial, economic, political, or managerial), the relevant objects of calculation (individual public entities, groups of public entities, the public sector as a whole, or the relevant communities), and the corresponding technical features (in terms of bases of accounting, prescribed sets and contents of budgeting and reporting documents, criteria used to classify revenues and expenditures, and sets of applicable accounting laws and standards).