General public’s understanding of economics: How to improve the Italian situation using British approaches

Every country’s goal is to enhance citizens’ well-being through the adoption of propaedeutic policies and measures (Frijters et al., 2019). Firstly, this paper analyses which political and economic strategies are the most used, mainly focusing on Libertarianism and Libertarian Paternalism: this allows to better understand that governments, especially the UK one, employ Behavioural Economics to nudge and influence their citizens, encouraging them to make well-informed day-to-day choices, predominantly in the financial sphere. Additionally, many analysts’ surveys and researches are presented, pointing out that lack of trust in economic and political bodies and reduced familiarity with financial and economic matters may forbid the achievement of the former goal: to mitigate this risk, one of Bank of England’s goals is producing publications understandable by non-expert individuals too, reducing the communication gap present between speaker (the Central Bank) and listeners (British general public). Finally, this paper studies how these techniques improved the comprehension of detailed reports, and, being in a similar situation of financial knowledge, it develops suggestions on how the Bank of Italy (Bankitalia) might adopt equivalent strategies to achieve the same goal, i.e., enhancing Italians’ understanding of economics, allowing them to make wise personal financial decisions, as well as improving the health of Italy’s economic and financial systems.