The issues related to fiscal pressure and the perceived lack of rule of law are instead quite real (see every independent ranking about corruption or ease of doing business).
A startup visa program without a serious effort to fix these obvious issues (something that should be done beforehand) is useless.
I've read the summary of the new policies, not enough numbers and details, i hope to find the full document somewhere.
Also, intriguing the fact that you need to show that you have at least 50k in pre-existing founding to partecipate to the program, it make sense to add some filtering criteria but i'm not sure how many new startups will qualify.
I'm Italian too, live in Italy, and I'm really sick of this ill-informed self-disparaging attitude from so many Italians. There are millions of Italians who will say "I haven't personally never been touched by this, I don't even know anybody who was personally touched by it, but I know this, because... well, just because, everybody knows it".
Are there corruption and crime in Italy? Yes, of course. But, except for some areas in the South, they are nowhere as prevalent as so many people seem to think.
The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be
It's a PERCEPTIONS rank.
"Very serious problems with crime" compared to what?
Italy's got a lot of problems. But it's not Brazil, not by a long shot.
Italy's problem is bureaucracy and outright laziness far more than corruption or crime. And the fact that you can't fire anyone.
Please, we've even got members of the Parliament who have been convicted for mafia issues!!
As stated by gruturo the real problems are taxes, inadequate laws, infrastructure (for example cable connection is scarce even in the bigger cities) and finally economic issues.
I was born in Italy and I love my country, but I had to move to a different country to be able to work and being payed for my work.
Corruption, together with bureaucracy, is amongst the most severe problems that Italy has. The fact that now it's almost impossible to tell the difference and there a mixture of bad behaviour at any level of any position of power.
It is a BIG, HUGE issue, but not the main one ruling out housing business in Italy.
The main issue right now is the myopic political view driving the economy.
And btw, "bureaucracy" is not a bad thing per se! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy
[edit: added link]
And too many idiots thinking that stamps and signatures and certificates have magical powers and prevents the real ill-intentioned people from doing anything (we could say bureaucracy is the DRM for real life). Also people making use of their position as to gain personal power.
You have a point in saying that bureaucracy is not a bad thing per se, in both the original acception of the word and in some places, like in Germany it "mostly" works.
- taxes or regulations in Germany are like OS x
- taxes or regulations in Italy are machine code written by monkeys in the 50s based on 2000 years old Roman code and the last monkey who knew how to read it died 10 years ago. Now there's more monkeys writing on top of it not even pretending to make it work retroactively.
If you find a bug you must guess what to do and hope for the best. You can ask for a monkey machine code expert to decipher it for you but not even he knows how to do. He's just better at guessing. If you make a mistakes due to the bugs they send the Gorillas.
[edit: formatting]
In Italy you say the same thing and you are a hero, someone to admire and imitate.
It actually makes a lot of sense too when you see where taxes go in both countries.
As a proof, here we ended up talking of mafia and corruption, following common stereotypes and therefore giving a distorted idea of Italy. I think most of the people that are saying "run away" are implicitly trying to justify themselves for their decision to go away from their country and family.
Sadly, more than in culture, food and wine, Italians are the first for the most destructive self-criticism in the world. I have rarely heard a non-Italian speaking so low of his own country, as only Italians can do.
Maybe you could start by explaining why Italy comes 56th (between Turkey and Belarus) in the ease of doing business rankings: http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
I know all rankings can be criticised, but this one confirms everything I have read about things like rule of law and red tape in Italy.
It also ranks Malaysia better than Switzerland. Oh, please.
Luxemburg is part of a giant tax evasion scheme. That's the only reason why some multi-nationals are doing business there. They don't need "ease of doing business" like a startup does.
I really don't know nearly enough about Malaysia to compare it to Switzerland. Apparently you do.
Exactly. And that's why everybody is advising not to start a business there. Do you want extra challenges when you are doing something that is not easy already? Probably you think there is something "heroic" in it, but that's not the case for everybody.
I am an iOS developer. I left a country where I had a job I didn't like (not in iOS, but on Microsoft platforms) for a ridiculous salary, where working for yourself is a suicide. And I was one of the lucky ones. The moment I moved I got triple the salary for a job I liked and later was able to start my own business. Accounting and tax declaration here in NL is really easy, and fiscal pressure is much better. Frankly, since my life got immediately so much better outside of Italy I don't need to implicitly justify my decisions. I have plenty of explicit reason I can list.
You might find it disgusting that Italians throw mud at their own country, I find it sad to see people defending it only because it's their own country, and as such is exempted from criticism. Maybe you are the one trying to implicitly justify your decision to remain.
I tried, I said "I'll stay here, I'll pay taxes, make money and resurrect this country", so they added +10% taxes, reduced the "low income reduction" from people earning 30 000/year (gross) to 15000/year (gross), increased the "retirement fund" costs from 24% to 29% (and will increase up to 33.7% in 3 years they said) so I ended up, in one year, from paying ~30% taxes (plus accountant, required in Italy), to ~45%, increasing to 49% in 3 years.
And NO ONE said here the worst part. I can't believe no one mentioned.
The first year you work (not employed), you have to pay taxes for the first year and THE YEAR AFTER, yes, you have understood it: 90% taxes first year, plus accountant.
Good bye, my beloved country. There are a lot of smart people, but I have no idea how to survive there.
I considered staying. I considered doing exactly what you say: staying, working against the current, trying to change things. And then I decided not to.
Why?
Because I fully believe that Italy is doomed beyond any attempt to fix it. You should cut away pretty much 90% of the people holding any position of power in any public office. Trouble is, you can't do it by force. You must do it legally. Legally means asking them - they occupy the very same public office positions who would rule on this. Would they agree to it?
And with whom would you replace them?
The "new" guys, the fresh blood, very quickly adjust to the state of things - otherwise their career prospects (and in some extreme cases life expectancy) are cut sharply.
I really, really believe it can't be saved and therefore made a rational decision to leave and never look back.
It's a battle that can't be won, I decided not to fight it.
I'm Turkish studying Italian language and literature at uni, and I can assure you that Turks and Italians are competing a trophy in this race of self-bashing. So much so that I sometimes regret having got into studying italian culture.
Also I don't see those who stays there as people willing to overcome a real challenge, but like someone with no guts to move away from his/her place.
It's funny how the same thing can be seen in such different ways. I have been planning since long to go away from Italy and I will eventually go away, but I feel like it's an act of cowardice. You said just the opposite...
To those of you, stop bashing and start being the first change you want to see.
Those who stay are the ones with the real courage, people say. No, I'm really sorry, but those who stay are those who have their shoulders covered (by family, maybe) and may have some long-standing interests that give them enough stability to try what they want.
But, they won't change anything. The system is rigged, you cannot take the power away from those who hold it and who are in charge of the big, important decisions. That is, unless you are ok to play their conservative and self-preserving game, actually becoming part of the skewed systems. Look at what the Movimento 5 Stelle has already become.
Recently we even tried with oligarchy - officially called the government of the professors, it was a government made of the Italian "best minds" and it was appointed directly by the President of the Republic. It may have saved us, but it didn't really kickstarted the economy back. We're now in a triple-dip recession, ask any economist and he would gladly lecture you about our very interesting case.
We're a country where a lot of people saved and still manage to save, and that has naturally turned us into a very conservative country, where every little change is seen as a menace for the status quo.
Long story short, if you want to do something with your life and you have no settled financial interested (or you can manage them from abroad) you flee and put your studies and experience to good use. Otherwise you stay and either get involved in the mess or try to stay out of it and see yourself beaten to the punch by incompetents and people that are just ok with marching aligned with the old and distorted system.
Anyway, I'm not one of those self-deprecating Italian whiners. I don't hate my country. I just think the problem lies with the biggest part of our fellow Italians. It's a problem so hard to entangle and define that giving up is really the only viable solution.
I always thought that the perception of a country in foreign eyes is due to the contact with people of said country.
I try to remember every day that the perception that my friends and collegues abroad have of Italy is due in some small part to my own actions as a representative of that country.
So please, let's try to avoid generalizing. Not all Italians abroad are mercenaries or quitters that shit on they country they were born in.
I would say that most of us aren't.
Be serious, go abroad for 3 months. Start a limited company, be a self-employed person and you'll finally understand the obnoxious bureaucratic process one needs to undergo and what kind of unimaginable amount of things one needs pay to keep his/her business running in Italy.
But if you're going abroad, there are good chances that you're one of those who can make the difference.
And if those who can make the difference go abroad, how do you pretend to change things here?
Let me only say that this: if Italy is a sinking boat, people who leave the country, they don't have guts, they're all so many Schiettino.
In other words: http://i.imgur.com/dA5IUA1.png
Italy has currently a huge problem of smart, young people leaving the country because of this situation. Before trying to attract foreign they should be able to keep their own people.
Not all of us left because we were unhappy, but almost all of us left because we for one reason or other saw more opportunity elsewhere (e.g. in my case I left because getting larger financing for my startup at the time was easier in the UK). We're on average likely to be horrible misrepresentative of our countries as a whole.
"if you become large enough or successful enough, they will come to you"
I wonder how you can back it up with data (see also my comments below regarding stereotypes).
The books of Hernando de Soto have some good background on doing this in Peru. A key element of it is recognising which rules are unenforceable and repealing them, so instead of a thicket of unobeyable, intermittently enforced law you get a small robust core of law that's actually enforced fairly.
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Backward-Society-Edward-Banfield...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_S...
Of course, that's a small village in "the dark heart" of southern Italy 60 years ago, which is very, very different from a larger city in the north these days, so take it with a grain of salt: it's not going to be representative of "Italy".
I spent six months working in and around Naples (which, I know, is perhaps not entirely representative of the country, but is the third largest city in Italy) and the food was basically pizza or pasta. Often, not even particularly good pizza or pasta; I suppose when you don't have to compete with a variety of interesting foods from around the world, you can lower your standards.
Locals approved - approved! - of their local councils refusing to allow foreign restaurants. We gave up on getting a decent curry locally and we flew in someone from the UK to cook a curry for us because we just couldn't find anywhere. The attitude to food that wasn't Italian was disconcerting and depressing.
Maybe I'm a bit biased because I'm from Bologna in Emilia-Romagna and I would say that's among the best cuisines in the world. We brought you prosciutto, tagliatelle, ragu', tortellini, lasagna, balsamic vinegar, etc etc. :) And even here there are a lot of differences in food from town to town.
The fact that you still lump pasta all together after living in Italy for some time tells me you did not have the time to experience all the variety and quirks of different types of pasta. Again, I'm very biased but there's more than just "pasta" in a pasta-based cuisine, surprising as it sounds.
Don't listen too much to people who left their first world country and tries to convince themselves it was the right thing to do.
At the moment quite few Italians leave Italy: Only around 80,0000 yearly (~0.1% of the population).
For comparison, Denmark, with 1/11 the population of Italy and usually ranked one of the best places in the world to do business, experiences emigration of 45,000 per year (~1% of the population).
The immigration into Italy dwarfs the migration away from Italy.
This is without adding other systemic diseases. Having a tax check is not a desirable outcome in Italy. One anecdote from a friend: he got a tax inspection in his company (in the construction sector). After two days of checks, nothing was found. But instead of being left alone, the inspectors told him this: "we haven't found anything, but since we have been checking for two days, we have to find something". In the end they agreed on faking some irregularities on the heating system and a 500€ fine.
Yes, this is just one episode, but not really an uncommon one, unfortunately.
I left my country 5 years ago and never looked back. There are so many better places in Europe, I strongly advice not to start a company in Italy.
as crazy as it may sound, this is true and happens all the time. I've got countless similar stories from friends who went through it.
Hmm. Why not go there, write some code for the broader world, start the business somewhere else?
[edit: typo]
The government pretty much accepts that certain categories (say, dentists) hide a lot of their profits. Instead of fixing this, they decided to just assume you are hiding ~60% of what you declare and tax you accordingly.
A few years later they decided to just create a table of what each professional from each category should earn and if you declare less than that you can expect an extremely unpleasant visit which WILL find something wrong with your business.
Law-abiding people get crushed under this weight, while tax evaders just declare even less (or even operate completely outside of the law). Good people get punished, bad people don't. Going to the authorities to report these people can be successful, or unsuccessful, or frustrating, or very unhealthy. Feel like gambling?
After 10 years of this you start wondering if you're the idiot. You can become one of the "furbi", or keep trying to work in this broken framework, or leave.
I left.
Oh and the tax code is so byzantine you need to pay a professional even if you have an extremely small and simple business. And even they make mistakes. And you get to pay for those mistakes.
You all should just reform the Holy Roman Empire... ;-)
</sarcasm>
In both countries the south has nothing to do with the north.
In both countries the south if sunny, happiness and optimism. But also non serious in all areas of life, including business, and friendship influence and favors economy, also called corruption.
I have a German friend that was so happy when he sold so many products to south Italian customers. I asked if he was sure they were going to pay...sure enough he was lucky to get paid at all(after a way longer time than compromised and after lots of problems).
Italy is a beautiful place to live, but not for work. You could get the same access to industry, business friendliness and employment that you get in North of Italy in Switzerland or Austria, but without the tax of having to continuously subsidize the south.
Have you some serious FACT to show? Something you can COMPARE to French, Spain , Ireland or Germany?
Do you know the thinnest book in the world? Italian heroes...