During 2024, 65 Italian municipalities declared a financial crisis, of which 31 with the rebalancing procedure and 34 in bankruptcy, compared to the 75 recorded in 2023. There were five cases in which a “false start” occurred, with three Calabrian municipalities and one in Campania which failed to approve the rebalancing plan and ended up in bankruptcy, and one in Sicily, where the procedure. The data emerges from the eighth Report of the Cà Foscari University of Venice on Italian Municipalities edited by the Governance & Social Innovation Center in collaboration with the Ifel Foundation and published by Castelvecchi, which will be illustrated and discussed during the Festival of Statistics on 16 October in Treviso. As for the debt stock, the procedures activated since 1989 (year of establishment of the financial crisis) and 2012 (year of introduction of the rebalancing procedure) were 1,383 as of 31 December 2024, corresponding to 1,001 municipalities.
This year too, the strong territorial connotation is confirmed, with a prevalence of the phenomenon in the South – in particular Calabria, Campania and Sicily – while the number of small municipalities involved prevails in absolute value, but not in relation to the class of population they belong to, where the greater incidence of financial criticality can be noted in the larger ones.
«The research – underlines a note from the Venetian university – confirms that the current system for managing the financial crises of the Municipalities is not adequate for the aim pursued, poorly timely and not adequately incisive in terms of support for the Municipalities in terms of support and training. Once again, the urgent need to modify the current regulations in agreement with the recipients emerges.” The in-depth themes of the eighth volume concern, in particular, the issue of common goods and predictive models of financial criticality. Some “new” themes are also highlighted, such as mountain catchment basins and municipalities in the Regions with special statute. There is no shortage of the usual update essays on the state of the art of the Pnrr, of the regulatory innovations that have affected the Municipalities and internal areas.