2. Relazioni di scenario 45 MYRTA MERLINO Giornalista Welcome, professor Spence. It is a great honor for us to have you here. I know that you know very well Italy, having lived in Italy for a period of time. And so we would like also to know from you if you share our feeling that Italy is now in a very positive moment, it is central in European politics. Thank you. MICHAEL SPENCE Premio Nobel per l’Economia 2001 Thank you very much. I can be brief. I do share, so maybe I could sit down. No, let me stay here. President Sella, president Sassoli de Bianchi, prime minister Prodi, and honorable ministers Colao and Cingolani, and ladies and gentlemen, leaders in business, in innovation and contributors to your society, it’s an honor frankly to be here, to be part of the celebration of all your achievements. And I want to say a special thank you to my good friend Marco Palmieri, from whom I’ve learned a great deal and who I think took the risk of suggesting I might try to contribute to your meeting. But what makes this a special privilege is to be here with you at what is increasingly becoming evident to be a major transformational turning point in the trajectory of the Italian economy. And I think you can detect the rising optimism. Some of it showed up in the data that you saw a little while ago. And I want to say I share that optimism, and I think it’s entirely justified. Now, I spent the better part of the last two decades involved in one way or another in understanding, even sometimes trying to help, in major structural changes, transformations in a whole variety of different economies. And over that time and learning from leaders like you, it became clear what some of the key ingredients are. In all cases, the private sector is the proximate source of the dynamism and innovation, for sure;
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