The Ministry for the Economy and Finance, Pier Carlo Padoan, and the Chairman of the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), Giuseppe Pisauro, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the transmission by the Ministry of the information needed to certify macroeconomic forecasts and to conduct the assessments of the public finances that the PBO is charged with performing. The initial implementation of the memorandum will come with the Government’s imminent presentation of the Update of the 2014 Economic and Financial Document.
The PBO was established in compliance with the European budget governance arrangements introduced with the Two Pack, under which the macroeconomic forecasts underpinning the budget programmes of the Member States and the public finance documents must be validated by an independent national budget monitoring institution. In transposing the European regulation into national law, Constitutional Law no. 1 of 2012 introduced the principle of a balanced budget and provided for the creation of an independent institution to monitor developments in the public finances and assess compliance with fiscal rules.
