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Archive » February 2016 » A special case or simply a case of regional imbalances? Italy’s Southern Question in Transnational Perspective

A special case or simply a case of regional imbalances? Italy’s Southern Question in Transnational Perspective

John A. Davis
February 2016 - n. 1
Jel codes: B20, F02, G01, N90

In recent years there has been a general consensus that the economic disparities between Italy's North and the South should be approached not as a special case but as one example case of regional imbalances and underdevelopment evident in many other European states and in the Usa. Those arguments took shape in the 1980s and were accentuated by the evident failures of the final decades of the post-war development programme and the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno. The critique of those policies, combined with new ideas promoted by the spectacular successes of the Third Italy in the 1980s, paved the way for new policy proposals aimed to promote local initiatives in the southern regions and build up new stock of «social capital». The crisis of the Italian political system in the early 1990s and the Eu regional development and cohesion policies created the opportunities for adopting new policies focused on specific regions and abandoned the broader notion of a «Questione meridionale». Among the reasons that have been advanced to explain the continuing relative decline of economic and social conditions throughout the South, this paper focuses on the analysis developed by Luigi De Rosa. Surveying the course of the southern economies since Unification, De Rosa argued that reasons for the failure to develop consistent responses are best explained by the power exercised at a political level by powerful vested interests in the North but also in the South.

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