Spending review e pareggio di bilancio. cosa rimane dell'autonomia locale

Since the World Financial crisis of 2007-2008, private banking bail-out by States public financial intervention have brought many European States to a significant budget crisis, with strong imbalances on their sovereign debts. With the so-called Fiscal compact within the Economic and Monetary Union, some of European States have changed their Constitution to deal with their financial and expenditure problems, trying also to reduce local institutions’ public expenditures. Italian Constitution has been changed in 2012, mainly by introducing the principle of structural balance for public budgets as general rule for any of the public institutions and local authorities. This brought to a strength relevance of the macroeconomic dimension on evaluating pub-lic policies, as economical concepts became now the concrete content of the Constitution itself, already bringing to specific ambitious spending re-view programs, starting form early 2012. The essay analyses all these topics, both legal and institutional, also in a macroeconomic perspective, especially through the reconstruction of a prescriptive, normative meaning of the con-cept of spending review.