A group of economists working with the website Lavoce.info calculated that if all Italian laws were written as clearly as the fundamental principles of the Constitution, Italy's GDP would be about 5% higher today, or nearly 110 billion euros a year. To come up with the estimate, they started with a simple observation: an unclear legislative framework generates uncertainty about rights and obligations, discourages investment, curbs innovation and hinders entrepreneurial growth, thus reducing the country's productive potential. Based on this premise, they first estimated the effect of regulatory quality on legal uncertainty, and then the impact of the latter on GDP. In recent years, the quality of Italian legislation has deteriorated dramatically, creating an unprecedented regulatory chaos. Laws have grown longer and longer, infused with disparate subjects, until they have become obscure and often indecipherable even for the most experienced readers. Today, 85% of the sentences in the texts of laws exceed 25 words - the limit indicated by linguists as the threshold beyond which text clarity is compromised. On average, for every 100 words, an Italian law contains more than four cross-references to other normative texts, creating a maze of cross-references that makes interpretation extremely difficult.