Italian economists warned of recessive effects of austerity and called for reforms in the country struggling for the formation of a new government to replace the technocratic cabinet of outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti.

"I am worried that Italy would die from austerity after willfully choosing it," Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a visiting scholar at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and former member of the executive board of the European Central Bank (ECB), said.

Speaking at Milan-based ISPI institute of International Politics, Bini Smaghi said that excessive fiscal austerity is the result of crisis-hit countries waiting until the last minute before acting, mainly by raising taxes rather than implementing structural reforms.

The most effective recipe to reduce the huge burden of the debt accumulated, the expert said, would be coupling budgetary adjustment with structural reforms, which is what the ECB asked Italy to accomplish in August 2011.

Promoting economic and social reforms with a globalization-oriented view could stimulate growth potential, increase attractiveness for investors and ease the burden of the necessary budget adjustment, he said.

But structural changes are "politically difficult to implement" as they require measures that are opposed by lobbies that are represented in governments or parliaments which thus tend to delay them until the financial markets start losing confidence, Bini Smaghi noted.

The longer governments wait, he added, the more painful the steps required to restore investors' confidence would be, while, on the other hand, market pressure makes it easier to persuade parliaments and the electors that the alternative to the tough measures would be much worse.

In this vicious circle, the austerity introduced by the Monti cabinet as well as by previous governments amid deepening crisis was "not imposed on Italy but was self-inflicted," Bini Smaghi said. He wished the new government would be "strong" enough to introduce courageous reforms rather than resort again to unbearable tax hikes.

Sharing his view, Alberto Alesina, a political economics professor at Bocconi University in Milan and columnist of Corriere della Sera national newspaper, noted that the impact on growth of excessively restrictive budgetary measures was more recessionary than expected.

In the autumn of 2011 the European Commission forecast a budget deficit of 2.3 percent for Italy in 2012 and a debt-to-GDP ratio at 120.5 percent. One year later, the deficit was revised up to 3 percent and the debt peaking at 127 percent of GDP.

Though some austerity is necessary in times of crisis, the evidence from over 40 years of fiscal policies across the area of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) clearly showed that adjustments achieved through spending cuts were less recessionary than those achieved through tax increases, Alesina said.

Moreover, he added, spending-based consolidations accompanied by the right moves, including easy money policy, liberalization of goods as well as labor market and other structural reforms, tend to be less recessionary or even have a positive impact on growth.