ROME: Economy remain as its recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, its internal banking crisis of 2011 and the eurozone crisis of 2014-15 has been extremely slow and leaves it lagging behind the dominant French and Germans.
GDP grew 1.5 percent last year and is forecast to hit 1.4 percent in 2018 but Italians feel their country is being left behind by their northern neighbours and this has led to a growing anti-EU sentiment which could be a key factor when votes are cast next weekend.
Milan-based Nicola Nobile of Oxford Economics said: “We still have a gap of growth between Italy and others of around 1 percent GDP growth, which has been shrinking recently but it is still there.”