Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

News that Italians now enjoy a higher standard of living than the British made me think: my God, life must be truly awful in Britain.

Yes, the Italians do have much to feel good about in terms of the quality of their lives thanks to the beauty of their country, the splendour of their history, culture and cuisine, and their impressive defence of the traditional family and way of life from the threats to them of the modern world.

When I’m drinking, I buy a superb local Sangiovese for €2.60 a litre dispensed into plastic mineral water bottles from a huge cask in a wine shop in Ravenna run by a man whose nickname is God

But on the face of it the Italians would seem to have precious little to crow about on the economic front. Italy is the only G7 country, for instance, where real wages have not increased at all, and in some cases decreased, since the launch of the Euro in 1999.

I speak from personal experience. I gave up being a freelance journalist in Italy in 2015 because we ended up like hand-loom weavers in the industrial revolution with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in 1764, paid worse than dishwashers and bog cleaners.

It happened overnight, more or less.

In 2003, when I first began a weekly column called Fumo di London (London Smoke) for an Italian national newspaper they paid me €350 net per column which was not bad by Italian standards. I also worked for a regional newspaper that paid much more because, in addition to a more frequent column called Zuppa Inglese (English Soup, a.k.a Trifle), I had an editing role as well.

But as a result of the internet revolution and the collapse of print journalism, accompanied as they were by the global financial crash, and then the Euro crisis, my national newspaper fee was halved, then slashed again.

So I quit. The regional newspaper, meanwhile, went bust.

Yet, apparently, regardless of tales of woe such as mine, Italy’s GDP per capita, when adjusted for the difference in the cost of goods and services, has overtaken Britain’s.

Last year, it rose to $60,847 (£44,888) ahead of Britain’s $60,620 (£44,721) for the first time since 2001, according to World Bank figures. Prior to that, measured by this key yardstick, the Italians had enjoyed a better standard of living than the British since 1987 when their GDP briefly overtook Britain’s. But that was before they signed up for the Euro.

The technical name for this standard of living yardstick is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) and it measures purchasing power per person. GDP per capita, on the other hand, measures economic output per person.

But trust me. I speak as one who has lived in Italy for........

© The Spectator