Italy's economic recovery is picking up steam, but chronically low growth means the country still faces an arduous struggle to mend its ailing public finances and slash its massive debt pile, the Audit Court said on Wednesday.
"Despite initial uncertainty, the Italian economy seems to have changed direction towards a less fragile, more qualitative expansion," read the court's 2017 report on public finances which was presented in Rome.
Italy's gross domestic product grew 0.9 percent last year, meaning the economy "finally exited from a protracted recession that lasted eight years," the report stated, referring the country's worst downturn since World War II.
But the report warned that fixing Italy's public finances to health was "harder" for Italy than other European countries. It also stressed, however, that this was "necessary given the high debt level".
Italy is due to present around 3.4 billion euros of extra deficit cuts for this year before the end of April in response to the EU executive's request to bring down its huge public debt of around 133 percent of gross domestic product - the highest in the euro zone after Greece's.
The report also underlined that Italy's labour-tax wedge - the difference between a worker's net pay and their total cost to employers - is 10 percentage points over the European Union's average.
Italy's tax-to-GDP ratio also needed to be reduced, saying the current situation "does not help the fight against the black economy and tax evasion," the report stated.
