Change

I have often written of the difficulty of sorting the euro into a viable currency zone. The debt troubles we see at the moment are unfortunately, serious as they are, only a symptom of the problem.

The southern countries - I am excluding Ireland for the moment which has problems of a different nature - are, quite simply, less efficient. This is caused by lack of investment, by bizarre inefficient labour practices and by regulation. They are not liberalised economies.

A while ago my computer crashed on a Monday morning. After lunch I 'phoned the computer shop who said he couldn't help me until the following day. Why not? He must have been open or he wouldn't have answered the 'phone. Oh, he was working, he said, and had time to solve a fairly basic problem for me, but by law he could not open on Monday afternoons. So I met him in the local car park, surreptitiously handed over my computer, both of us feeling like drug dealers, and collected it in the same way later.

Now Mario Monti has liberalised opening times for businesses so that, subject to, say, public order regulations for bars, they can open whenever they like and do not have to observe the half day closing in mid-week. A chemist or a clothes shop can open 24 hours a day.

Now, you would think that all this would pass easily and happily, making Italy a better place to live and work in. The effects would not be immediate. Attitudes take time to change: when the Prodi government made the momentous decision to allow people to get their hair cut on a Monday not much altered since the barbers had to have two days off; Saturday was their big day so Monday was a good day to close. Now a barber can open 7 days a week if his customers can get used to the idea.

And they're up in arms (not just the barbers). There is a deep seated suspicion that this will favour large suppliers who, with many staff, can always find someone to work on a bank holiday or a Sunday. The Region of Tuscany has referred the matter to the Constitutional court. The Lazio business federation, which covers Rome, says 100,000 enterprises could close. What? Why should they? Because the supermarkets will be open on the Feast of the Assumption and put the religious shopkeeper out of business?

Tempora muntantur nos et mutamur in illis: times change and we change with them. We have to change, we have to adapt to new circumstances. But we shall see, I think, that like the building of Rome, this isn't going to happen in a day. A Greek cabinet minister threatened to resign if they de-regulated the issuance of taxi licences. It will take ten years of concentrated effort to eliminate the vested interests in these countries and thus to make supply-side change possible and drag their economies up towards German levels. And this change has to happen first: otherwise any amount of subsidy to Italy will disappear into the black hole of its inefficiency.

Either Europe is ten years late in beginning the changes or Mrs Merkel has turned the austerity screw ten years too early. And as so often happens with the Europe Project, it comes up against the wishes of the people. They don't want change, either to efficiency or austerity.

It's going to be messy.