Italy's main employers lobby cut its growth forecasts on Thursday and said the economy would expand even less in 2016 than it did last year.
At current levels of growth, Italian output would take over 10 years to return to pre-crisis levels, Confindustria said after the economy failed to grow in the second quarter of the year.
Gross domestic product will rise an annual 0.7 percent this year compared to the 0.8 percent forecast previously will expand at an even slower pace of 0.5 percent in 2017, the Confindustria report said.
"We are failing to shake off this slow growth disease that has been afflicting us since the beginning of 2000," Confindustria's chief economist Luca Paolazzi told reporters.
Italy's finance minister Pier Carlo Padoan slammed the forecasts, saying: "we will show they are wrong".
But earlier this week, he said the government would revise down its down forecasts in an update due later this month. These currently stand at 1.2 percent growth this year and 1.4 percent in 2017.
Confindustria slashed its growth forecasts in July after Britain voted to leave the European Union but said in Thursday's report the immediate effects of 'Brexit' had been "less serious than feared".
