Key information about Italy Government Debt: % of GDP

• Italy Government debt accounted for 135.3 % of the country's Nominal GDP in Dec 2024, compared with the ratio of 136.2 % in the previous quarter.
• Italy government debt to GDP ratio data is updated quarterly, available from Dec 1995 to Dec 2024.
• The data reached an all-time high of 159.9 % in Mar 2021 and a record low of 103.9 % in Dec 2007.

• In the latest reports, Italy National Government Debt reached 3,069.8 USD bn in Dec 2024.
• The country's Nominal GDP reached 538.7 USD bn in Mar 2023.

The statistic presents a ranking of Italy's largest creditors', the organisations that have bought up Italian government bonds. As of Q4 2011, Intesta Sanpalo of Italy was the largest creditor, holding Italian bonds to the value of just over 58 billion U.S. dollars.

According to a survey from 2018, most Italian respondents perceived the financial crisis from 2008 as a menace. A decade after the global financial crisis hit Italy in 2008, this topic was still object of discussions. Over 80 percent of interviewees declared that the international financial crisis was either as bad as it appeared to be or even worse. Consequences of the 2008 crisis can be seen in macro-economic aspects such as the unemployment and the inflation.

Unemployment    After 2008, the unemployment rate in Italy increased steadily. The highest figure was recorded in 2014, when the unemployment rate peaked at 12.7 percent. Afterwards, the rate started declining. In 2019, the unemployment rate registered its lowest figure since 2008. The financial crisis mostly affected the young population, reaching in 2014 the highest unemployment rate of the last years. That year, over 42 percent of the young population was unemployed.

Inflation rate 

Similarly, the inflation rate showed its largest figure in 2008. Compared to 2007, the inflation rate in Italy in 2008 increased by 3.3 percent. Inflation rate in mostly measured by analyzing the movement of the Consumer Price Index. The CPI is a measure that examines the changes in the purchasing-power of a currency. It measures changes in the price level of market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households.

The statistic shows the extent of lending by major European banks to Italy, during the Euro crisis. During the course of the euro crisis as of 31 December, 2010 Unicredit made lendings amounting to around 47.4 billion euros.

This statistic shows the national debt of Greece from 2019 to 2023, with projections until 2029. In 2023, the national debt in Greece was around 382.04 billion U.S. dollars. In a ranking of debt to GDP per country, Greece is currently ranked third. Greece's struggle after the financial crisis Greece is a developed country in the EU and is highly dependent on its service sector as well as its tourism sector in order to gain profits. After going through a large economic boom from the 1950s to the 1970s as well as somewhat high GDP growth in the early to mid 2000s, Greece’s economy took a turn for the worse and struggled intensively, primarily due to the Great Recession, the Euro crisis as well as its own debt crisis. National debt within the country saw significant gains over the past decades, however roughly came to a halt due to financial rescue packages issued from the European Union in order to help Greece maintain and improve their economical situation. The nation’s continuous rise in debt has overwhelmed its estimated GDP over the years, which can be attributed to poor government execution and unnecessary spending. Large sums of financial aid were taken from major European banks to help balance out these government-induced failures and to potentially help refuel the economy to encourage more spending, which in turn would decrease the country’s continuously rising unemployment rate. Investors, consumers and workers alike are struggling to see a bright future in Greece, whose chances of an economic comeback are much lower than that of other struggling countries such as Portugal and Italy. However, Greece's financial situation might improve in the future, as it is estimated that at least its national debt will decrease - slowly, but steadily. Still, since its future participation in the European Union is in limbo as of now, these figures can only be estimates, not predictions.

Several European Union member states have struggled with high levels of public debt in the period since the Global Financial Crisis. In particular, Greece's debt skyrocketed during the recession which followed the crisis, culminating in a period of intense political and social upheaval during the early 2010s in which the country came close to having to leave the Euro single currency zone. Along with Italy, Portugal, Spain and France, Greece is part of a group of EU members who have seen their debt soar to a value worth over one year's aggregate production in their economies (i.e. 100% of GDP) due to slow economic growth coupled with increasing public liabilities due to the need to provide emergency support to their domestic financial systems. Belgium, while also a part of this group of high-debt ratio countries has quite different circumstances, as its debt ratio has in fact fallen since the 1990s, remaining 20 percent below its 1995 level, even after a spike due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain were widely considered the Eurozone's weakest economies during the Great Recession and subsequent Eurozone debt crisis. These countries were grouped together due to the similarities in their economic crises, with much of them driven by house price bubbles which had inflated over the early 2000s, before bursting in 2007 due to the Global Financial Crisis. Entry into the Euro currency by 2002 had meant that banks could lend to house buyers in these countries at greatly reduced rates of interest.

This reduction in the cost of financing contributed to creating housing bubbles, which were further boosted by pro-cyclical housing policies among many of the countries' governments. In spite of these economies experiencing similar economic problems during the crisis, Italy and Portugal did not experience housing bubbles in the same way in which Greece, Ireland, and Spain did. In the latter countries, their real housing prices (which are adjusted for inflation) peaked in 2007, before quickly declining during the recession. In particular, house prices in Ireland dropped by over 40 percent from their peak in 2007 to 2011.

The statistic shows Japan's national debt from 2019 to 2022 in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), with projections up until 2029. In 2022, the national debt of Japan amounted to about 256.3 percent of the gross domestic product. An eye on Japan’s national debt Japan’s national debt ranks first among countries with the highest debt levels in the world, far surpassing the debt levels of Greece - which ranks number two - whose financial crisis has been in the spotlight recently. Italy is third, followed by Jamaica, Lebanon and Enritrea. Currently, Japan’s national debt amounts more than a thousand trillion yen and the country’s debt is predicted to keep rising for the foreseeable future, albeit only slightly. Japan’s national debt is not without consequence for the global economy, because the country claims the fourth-largest share in global gross domestic product. Therefore, the effects on the global economy would and could have a much greater global impact than that of a country such as Greece - considering its share of the global economy adjusted for purchase power parity was less than 0.29 percent in 2011. The debt levels of China, the United States and India should also be watched closely as they together make up the largest share of global GDP. At the moment, Japan’s inflation rate is among the lowest in the world, but as Japan attempts to reduce its national debt, this could change.

During the first half of the 2010s, the Italian government debt has been almost totally owned by private investors, such as banks and financial intermediaries. Most notably, more than one third of the national debt was held by foreign investors. After the 2011 Eurozone crisis, the European Central Bank started to purchase government bonds through a quantitative easing measure. Hence, the share of Italian debt owned by the Bank of Italy increased from less than four percent in 2010 to 22 percent in 2024.

Government debt as a share of gross domestic product has risen for almost all of Europe's largest economies since the mid-20th century. While until the 1970s it was common for European countries to have debt levels of less than 20 percent of their GDP, with the onset of economic crises related to international financial instability and oil price shocks, the long-term slowdown of economic growth in Europe, and the substantial public spending burdens which states had incurred due to the expansion of welfare and social services, European governments began to amass significant amounts of debt.

Which European countries are the most indebted? Italy stands out as the country in Europe which has experienced the largest secular increase in its government debt level, with the southern European country having debt worth 1.4 times its GDP in 2022. Spain, the United Kingdom, and France have also experienced long-run increase in their debt levels to between 90 and 100 percent in 2022. Germany and Turkey, on the other hand, have experienced more gradual increases in their public debt, with both countries having debt worth less than half their GDP. Russia stands as an outlier, due to the fact that its debt level has fallen dramatically since the 1990s. After the eastern European country's transition from communism and particularly after the financial crisis it experienced in 1998, the Russian state has severely cut back on public expenditure, while also having little need to borrow due to the state ownership of the country's vast natural resources.

Abstract

For the first time since 1982, in 2009, global trade flows will not grow. According to the latest IMF projections global trade in goods and services is expected to drop by 11% during 2009 and to stagnate in year 2010. The recent collapse in exports following the unfolding of the financial crisis has generated new pressing questions about the relationship between banking crises and exports growth. Are the supply shocks due to the collapse in the banking system responsible for the falls in exports? Or is what we observe completely attributable to the demand side where we have also observed unprecedented drops particularly in developed countries? In Iacovone and Zavacka (2009) we explore these questions using data, below, from 23 past banking crises episodes involving both developed and developing countries during 1980-2000.

Kind of data

Aggregate data [agg]

Mode of data collection

Other [oth]

Standard errors in parentheses are clustered at the bank level. *** represents significance at the 1% percent level.

Descriptive statistics for the bank and sovereign CDS spreads, the bank and country variables and the market variables.

The long-term interest rate on government debt is a key indicator of the economic health of a country. The rate reflects financial market actors' perceptions of the creditworthiness of the government and the health of the domestic economy, with a strong and robust economic outlook allowing governments to borrow for essential investments in their economies, thereby boosting long-term growth.

The Euro and converging interest rates in the early 2000s

In the case of many Eurozone countries, the early 2000s were a time where this virtuous cycle of economic growth reduced the interest rates they paid on government debt to less than 5 percent, a dramatic change from the pre-Euro era of the 1990s. With the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis and the subsequent deep recession, however, the economies of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland were seen to be much weaker than previously assumed by lenders. Interest rates on their debt gradually began to rise during the crisis, before rapidly increasing beginning in 2010, as first Greece and then Ireland and Portugal lost the faith of financial markets.

The Eurozone crisis

This market adjustment was initially triggered due to revelations by the Greek government that the country's budget deficit was much larger than had been previously expected, with investors seeing the country as an unreliable debtor. The crisis, which became known as the Eurozone crisis, spread to Ireland and then Portugal, as lenders cut-off lending to highly indebted Eurozone members with weak fundamentals. During this period there was also intense speculation that due to unsustainable debt loads, some countries would have to leave the Euro currency area, further increasing the interest on their debt. Interest rates on their debt began to come back down after ECB Chief Mario Draghi signaled to markets that the central bank would intervene to keep the states within the currency area in his famous "whatever it takes" speech in Summer 2012.

The return of higher interest rates in the post-COVID era

Since this period of extremely high interest rates on government debt for these member states, the interest they are charged for borrowing has shrunk considerably, as the financial markets were flooded with "cheap money" due to the policy measures of central banks in the aftermath of the financial crisis, such as near-zero policy rates and quantitative easing. As interest rates have risen to combat inflation since 2022, so have the interest rates on government debt in the Eurozone also risen, however, these rises are modest compared to during the Eurozone crisis.

We investigate the effectiveness of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) in mitigating the transmission of credit risk from banks to their sovereign, using CDS spreads to capture bank and sovereign credit risk for a sample of 43 banks in 8 Euro Area countries over the period 2009–2020. If the BRRD bail-in framework is credible, changes in bank default risk should not be transmitted to sovereign risk. In a novel approach we use banks earnings announcements to identify exogenous shocks to bank credit risk and investigate to what extent bank risk is transmitted to sovereign risk before and during the BRRD era. We find that bank-to-sovereign risk transmission has diminished after the introduction of the BRRD, suggesting that financial markets judge the BRRD framework as credible. The decline in bank-sovereign risk transmission is particularly significant in the periphery Euro Area countries, especially Italy and Spain, where the bank-sovereign nexus was most pronounced during the sovereign debt crisis. We report that the lower bank-to-sovereign credit risk transmission is associated with the parliamentary approval of the BRRD and not with the OMT program launched by the ECB to affect sovereign yield spreads, nor with specific bail-in or bailout cases which occurred during the BRRD era. Finally, we document that the reduction in risk transmission is most pronounced for banks classified as a Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB), stressing the importance of additional capital buffers imposed by Basel III.

CLN seeks significant debt reduction to tackle the ongoing crisis in the automotive sector, highlighting the pressures faced by suppliers as car production declines.

Standard errors in parentheses are clustered at the bank level. *** represents significance at the 1% percent level.

As of December 2019, most Italians did not know what the European Stability Mechanism was. Additionally, 25 percent had general knowledge about this European organization, while only nine percent declared to exactly know what the ESM was.

The ESM is an international European organization located in Luxembourg providing financial funding for the monetary stability of the Eurozone. Its proposed reform was an object of discussion in Italian politics in the last months. The parties Lega and Fratelli d'Italia put the topic into discussion, accusing the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of lack of transparency about the proposed reform. However, the terms of the reform were already known in December 2018.

This statistic shows the largest amounts loaned to EU-crisis states by selected European banks following the financial crisis in Europe (as of December 31, 2010). EU-crisis states include Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. At this time, HSBC granted these nations loans totaling around 5.7 billion euros.

As of the first semester of 2017, the total assets of the Italian banking system amounted to 3.92 trillion euros. According to the data provided by the Bank of Italy, over the period considered the assets of the banking sector fluctuated between 3.63 trillion euros in 2008 and a peak of 4.2 trillion euros in 2012. When compared to other European countries, the Italian banking system ranked fourth in terms of total assets in 2018 behind the UK, which topped the ranking with over 14.1 trillion U.S. dollars, France and Germany.

Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit dominate the market in Italy

In 2020, most of the assets of the Italian banking sector (approximately 1.9 trillion euros) were held by the two leading banking institutions in the country: UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo. The two banking groups have dominated the Italian market for the last decade. UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo boasted respectively 2.5 and 3.1 thousand branches around the country in 2021 and employed over 90 thousand individuals each in 2018. Moreover, both banking groups are present in several other European markets as well as outside Europe.

Recovering but still vulnerable

Since the financial crisis, the Italian banking sector has been recovering due to government actions undertaken to deal with the most problematic banks. However, Italian banks remain weak. The reduction of non-performing loans (NPLs) has progressed. The stock of gross NPLs of Italian banks declined, reaching a value of approximately 324 billion euros in the first semester of 2017. Bad loans (debt with the worst recovery prospects) also decreased while the bad debt coverage ratio improved.