Italy's economy expected to grow by 1% in 2026 (prev. 0.5%), but warns of a renewed slowdown in 2027, Confindustria reports

Forecasts from national employers' confederations sit in the second tier of the Italian macro calendar, behind Istat, the Bank of Italy and the government's own planning documents, and tend to matter as a read on business sentiment and policy pressure rather than as a market-moving print. An upward revision to near-term growth paired with a warning on the following year is a familiar shape in Italian forecasting: it typically reflects a near-term tailwind, whether fiscal impulse, EU fund disbursement or export momentum, that the forecaster judges to be temporary, with the structural drag of weak productivity and high public debt reasserting itself thereafter. Confindustria's prior form in episodes of this kind is to use the publication to lobby for investment incentives and labour market reform, so the accompanying policy demands are often as informative as the numbers. The distinction worth drawing is between the revision itself, which reflects data already in the rear view, and the slowdown warning, which is the forward-looking signal and the part that informs how the government frames its budget plans. The follow-ons that matter are whether official forecasters converge toward this view and how it feeds into the fiscal assumptions embedded in BTP issuance and the spread against core paper. As a private-sector projection rather than an official release, the signal is directional.