Italy and the euro

The story of the Italian economy is, of course, a complex one, so here is just one argument why Italian governments were eager to adopt the euro and why going back to the lira is not very popular with the Italian public according to all we know. Figure 1 shows the development of public debt to GDP ratio since 1995. Clearly, it declined in the years up to the adoption of euro and until the crisis of 2008. The crisis, to remind ourselves, was not