The Covid-19 pandemic and the war against Ukraine, with their significant socio-economic costs, have put stronger pressure on development assistance spending among traditional donors, as the cases of Sweden and the United Kingdom attest. Confronted with higher energy costs, inflation and a potential recession, the political imperative across Europe is to allocate resources to tackle immediate domestic challenges rather than expanding international development programmes – against all the lessons of interdependence that the pandemic might have taught. Italy is not immune to this trend, as recent developments also seem to suggest.
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