Abstract

The economic governance of the European Union establishes the interaction between a supranational level, which acts to prevent the economic crisis in light of the preventive arm of the stability and growth pact, and a national level. To what extent and why does Italy implement the country-specific recommendations? Employing an innovative dataset on 183 recommendations issued in the period 2002-2018, we show that Italy has a low performance. The preventive arm is not a technocratic mechanism and free from political considerations. On the contrary, we find strong impact of governments’ position, both on the left-right dimension and towards the European integration, on the implementation of the recommendations. Economic pressure is, however, not relevant.