Then there’s Draghi himself. While Garicano and others have expressed more frankly that European countries must also loosen labor market restrictions and scale back welfare programs (the very thing that closing the gap is supposed to preserve), Draghi’s tone in the report is more muted. Yet in the 1990s, when he was intimately involved in sweeping neoliberal reforms as the director general of the Italian Treasury, he personally oversaw mass privatization efforts and enforced the budgetary constraints that led to severe cuts in social spending. That Italy became the prime example of dysfunctional stagnation in the advanced world, including posting the worst average per capita growth rate in the world during the 2000s, is in no small part due to the vincolo esterno generation of policy economists that included Draghi

It has so far shown little appetite for wide-ranging reforms of the Bretton Woods Institutions that cripple climate and development spending in the global south.