Vita e Pensiero

Secondo fascicolo del 2021

The paper looks at regional economic structure and performance of Italian regions and reviews some recent contributions focussed on the Italian “Mezzogiorno” with a specific focus on the effect of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Pandemics (Covid-19) crisis. A comparison between Italy and the rest of the EU indicates a structural difference between the underperforming Italian economy and the rest of the Union due to the specific structure of the Italian economy in terms of sector and firm size and the consequences on strategic and organizational issues of weak small businesses and inefficient medium and large enterprises...

Based on official statistics and original estimates, the paper investigates the enduring consequences of the Great Recession and pandemic crises on the Sicilian economy. It underlines the need for regional resilience in response to the new industrial trends. Since 2008, gross fixed capital formation declined, unemployment and skilled outmigration raised...

Under what conditions can Sardinia – a peripheral island with a small population – proceed along a steady path of economic development? This is the crucial question addressed in this paper, which examines the economic and social situation of Sardinia within the national and the European scenario which is characterized by a strong polarization process fuelled by agglomeration forces...

After a triennium (2015-2017) of relative growth, the economy of Campania (and the Mezzogiorno) has significantly slowed down, and the gap with Centre-North has increased again. Thus, as in the past, the economic, institutional, social, and political aspects of the structural fragility characterizing the region have again made the positive short-term conjuncture little effective in triggering a real and durable process of convergence towards the more developed Centre-Northern regions...

Del Monte’s book deals with the convergence among different and heterogeneous areas of a single country. He has adopted a comparative approach: the two less developed areas are the two Souths, Italy, and the USA. Its purpose is to explain the fact that the famous convergence thesis of neo-classical growth theory holds for the American South but not for the Mezzogiorno. In a first approximation, the answer lies in the fact that growth in the South of the USA and the Mezzogiorno followed two different patterns...