What is the 'Italian system' in 2025? Does it really exist, and how does it react to major global changes? These are far from new questions, which are coming to the fore in a historical phase of extraordinary complexity. Understanding Italian dynamics today requires a wide-ranging and articulated view, capable of integrating historical reading, structural analysis and strategic reflection. This is the aim of this issue of Rivista di Politica Economica, which brings together eight contributions on crucial junctures in contemporary Italy: from the international role to political-administrative transformations, from private savings to industrial policy.

The picture that emerges is that of a country resilient but marked by contradictions: capable of effective impulses and responses, but also held back by chronic weaknesses. Italy remains a manufacturing powerhouse of global importance, but with a downsized production base and strongly tied to European value chains. Exports remain a strong point, although suffering from a limited presence of large companies. Private savings are abundant, but struggle to turn into an engine of development. Politically, after a decade of turbulence, the country has regained relative stability, albeit without solid institutional reforms and with a system still very much centred on individual leaderships.

Structural challenges remain deep: low levels of education and skills, territorial inequalities, low productivity, inadequate public administration, inefficient judicial system. In this scenario, geopolitical tensions and changes in global governance raise further questions, as do European fragmentation and the Union's difficulties in building a common strategic vision.

Yet, there is no shortage of opportunities. The return of industrial policy, the potential of the PNRR, the role of SMEs and Italy's geopolitical centrality in the Mediterranean can be decisive levers. Provided they are accompanied by effective governance, targeted reforms and a shared strategic vision. The essays collected in this volume address these issues from different perspectives, but they converge in the need to finally address the country's weaknesses in a systemic and forward-looking manner. The initial questions remain unanswered, but the contributions offer valuable keys for orientation in a historical phase that is as challenging as it is full of possibilities.

• Saving constitutes a valuable resource for individual and collective well-being, which nevertheless remains under-utilised in continental Europe: the large amounts of liquid assets deposited in current accounts, but also the comparison with investments, which are structurally lower than savings capacity, give a tangible idea of this. As a consequence, a significant share of European savings is invested in external financial assets.

• The difficulty in creating a virtuous circle between savings and investments is explained by cultural and structural factors. For Italy, the low propensity to risk of households and the preference given to real estate investment, the particular structure of the industrial fabric and the limited access of companies to the capital market are all relevant. Looking at Europe, the fragmentation of financial markets, regulation and supervision, together with a development of private pension funds not comparable to that of the Anglo-Saxon world, is a burden.

• The proposal for a Savings and Investments Union was born with the ambition of directing savings to the financing of the major challenges Europe faces to preserve competitiveness and reduce the technology gap with the world's largest economies.

• Financial intermediaries have a key role to play on the twin fronts of advising households on the use of savings and supporting business growth and investment by facilitating their access to capital markets.

JEL Classification: D14, G11, G51 .
Keywords: savings, wealth, household financial assets, Savings and Investments Union.

• The call for reforms is now something of a mantra that is being raised from everywhere, both in the private sector and within the institutions themselves, as a necessary precondition for greater competitiveness of our country's system.

• While the public decision-making process struggles to guarantee them, the institutions have been affected by the country's political, cultural, economic and social changes, adapting to them in their procedures and practices, without these changes necessarily being matched by real reforms. They therefore move beyond and sometimes in spite of what the rules of the institutional game envisage.

• In this contribution, we will clarify what is meant by institutional reforms in a historical perspective and what structural reforms consist of. Then, the relevance of these reforms on economic and social relations will be considered. The topic of institutional reforms will then be brought up to date in the context of the NRP. Finally, we will look specifically at the issue of justice and its relationship with the country's growth and economic stability.

JEL Classification: K40, O52, P17.
Keywords: structural reforms, constitutional reforms, competitiveness, justice, economic growth.