Over the past weekend, Italy's caretaker cabinet formally approved plans to begin paying its overdue bills to domestic suppliers and service providers. Its official arrears have aggravated underlying problems, such as access to credit by small and medium size businesses, who are the main creditors. The problems of the SMEs has also contributed to the rising non-performing loans of Italian banks. For the first time, last October Eurostat published a note on the "stock of liabilities of trade credits and advances". These are the unpaid liabilities of governments used to purchase goods and services. These are, ... (full story)