Visitors to a recent conference in northern Italy became painfully aware of what ails the Italian economy. It was fascinating to watch how a ferry employee methodically slowed down the sales of tickets to a long line of tourists who watched aghast as the mostly empty ferries left without them. At train stations and on high-speed trains redundant employees were obvious. The public sector problems in Italy are similar to China's with the state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, only several times bigger.