By Alberto Cavicchiolo

Together with Commissioner Giuseppe Zamberletti and regional president Antonio Comelli, Dario Barnaba was one of the promoters of the reconstruction project for the Italian region of Friuli, when it was devastated by an earthquake in 1976.

Thanks to this team, the Friuli region experienced unprecedented renewal which, over the course of about 10 years, led to a full recovery and marked the establishment of the “Friuli model”.

In 2011, 35 years later, Dario Barnaba was invited to Tokyo, where he declared to a large audience: “I see similarities between Fukushima and post-earthquake Friuli. The special autonomy statute was a decisive factor: the system of activities devised by the region’s parliament, government and administration was translated into tangible projects.”
Also thanks to that reconstruction, the Friuli Region, currently led by Massimiliano Fedriga, has become a very important industrial area.

Let’s compare the 1976 earthquake in Friuli with the 2020 crisis.

Damages in the territory would have amounted to about 20 billion in today’s euros (equivalent to almost 5,000 billion lire). The Region invested more than double that – 13,000 billion lire – which would be over 40 billion euros today. The current recovery plan is over 200 billion but with much higher benefits.

The crisis of 2020 is much more serious than the earthquake of ’76. This is primarily due to its diffusion, to the insecurity it causes in our citizens, to the economic crises it’s given rise to. So, it must be faced with maximum political and social cohesion.
Today, Friuli can offer an example of the political cohesion with which it faced and succeeded in what was perhaps the greatest and most demanding challenge in its history.

You were a 30-year-old councilor then. What were the steps in the reconstruction?

At 9.00 pm on May 6, 1976 a disaster struck the region. An earthquake lasting one minute (an eternal minute) and registering 6.5 on the Richter scale struck Friuli, affecting 5700 square kilometers (equal to 72% of the region’s area), and a population of nearly 600,000 inhabitants.

Friuli emerged from that minute shocked and unrecognizable; however the institutions, the government, the region, acted immediately. Prime Minister Aldo Moro appointed the Undersecretary of the Interior, Zamberletti, as extraordinary commissioner for the emergency – granting him exceptional powers.

Japan — August 21, 2011

At the time I was the regional secretary of the Italian Republican Party, I participated, together with others, in drafting the guidelines for reconstruction, personally dealing with the recovery of the artistic heritage, under the guidance of Antonio Comelli, a statesman of great foresight, collaborating with Salvatore Varisco and Roberto Dominici, appointed, at different times, as Council members in charge of reconstruction.

About 40,000 displaced people spent the winter on the Adriatic coast. How many houses did you build?

Winter, particularly cold in Friuli, was fast approaching and an inevitable and difficult choice had to be made: it was necessary to prepare to relocate and house all those who had been rendered homeless.
A complex operation led 40,000 people to move to coastal areas of Friuli Venezia Giulia (Grado and Lignano) and the Veneto region (Bibione, Caorle and Jesolo). By May 1977 20,000 dwellings had been built, covering a total area of 750,000 square meters, and situated in 30 villages, the population was later able to return to their hometowns.

How was the reconstruction implemented?

Summarizing a complex system it’s possible to highlight a few crucial steps: The “Solidarity Fund for Friuli”, was endowed on several occasions with substantial financial contributions, the use of which was delegated to the Region; while successive governments, from Aldo Moro, to Giulio Andreotti, and from Giovanni Spadolini to Bettino Craxi, prioritized getting production back on track.

The restoration of public service buildings, as well as the roads, water, electricity and telephone networks then followed, along with the construction of hydrogeological works, the static and functional recovery and the reconstruction of damaged or destroyed houses; finally, the restoration of artistic heritage and a focus on youth employment.

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By Francesco Rao, Journalist

Amidst the Covid crisis, Japan’s unique business culture stands out from that of other developed countries. The island nation has kept unemployment figures low despite recession and GDP losses; but, will it be sustainable in the long term.

Despite the economic slowdown, unemployment in Japan remains very low, below 3%. In a population of 126 million, over 66 million are employed. Official data from the Tokyo Statistics Bureau confirm that in May 2020 unemployment increased by 0.3%. Numbers that, when compared with the average of OECD countries, confirm the Japanese economy’s notable resistance in terms of stable employment during times of crisis. Yet Japan has been in technical recession since the fourth quarter of 2019, and in the second quarter of 2020, due to the lockdown, analysts announced a dramatic reduction in GDP: around ‑8%.

Considering that there are no unemployment benefits in Japan, the employment figures are much better than those in Europe and the US. In short, the Japanese stayed at work and the companies have kept paying their salaries. So, what makes Japan special?

Certainly the pandemic has caused fewer losses in Japan than elsewhere, but the economy has suffered damage nonetheless, which the government is seeking to contain with a major recovery plan. Companies have adopted remote working, a strategy favored by both the country’s impressive broadband infrastructure and the population’s high-level of digital literacy.

Photograph: recep-bg

However, this is not the only factor that determines the employment situation in Japan. It is also a matter of Japanese culture, as Vittorio Volpi, a financial adviser and banker with thirty years of experience in Japan, explains. “In Japanese getting fired is referred to as Kubi ni sura (getting it in the neck). It’s a social stigma for those doing the firing and also has repercussions for those who are put out of work.” For this reason, corporate reorganizations through layoffs are the last option.

In times of crisis, how do Japanese companies continue to pay employees who, in other countries, would be furloughed or fired? “The Japanese industrial mechanism must be understood based on the assumption that the country has a strong sense of group identity and is a Confucian society in terms of economic thinking,” Volpi states. “Companies tend to hold back a significant portion of profits: when difficult times come, they use these accumulated resources to keep paying salaries. In some sense, companies and employees are considered a single unit and have always counted on job stability as one of the pillars of success. So, for now, companies are not implementing layoffs because, among other things, they don’t want to lose talented employees, perhaps even to their competitors.”

The outlook is that Japan’s economy will recover much faster than Europe’s thanks to the dynamism of the entire Pacific area. In this regard, given the continuing uncertainty over Washington’s commitment to the Far East, Japan is paying special attention to maintaining friendly relations with India, Australia, and Indonesia with an eye towards containing China, which, moreover, is one of its major trading partners.

Should the crisis extend into 2021, Volpi warns that employment will also be under strain in Japan: “companies would be forced to restructure the employee framework, generally favoring the use of early retirement for workers (who would not be replaced by new hires) and not renewing employment contracts, practices which are increasing sharply. Permanent cutbacks in human resources would be the last resort: we are not in that kind of situation.”

Certainly there are doubts and fears about Japan’s future, given the ongoing geopolitical changes, years of slow-paced economic growth, and a public debt to GDP ratio that is expected to exceed 250% by the end of 2020—although the majority of that debt is held by Japanese lenders.

“Tokyo is not at ease about its future,” notes Volpi. “For over 60 years it has relied on US protection, thus saving on military spending and able to focus on the economy. But those days are over and the country feels the growing Chinese presence and assertiveness. For this reason it has launched a two-billion dollar program to bring tech companies back to Japan.”

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