What makes Southern Italy still lagging behind? A diachronic perspective of theories and approaches

† This paper is mostly based on a study entitled ‘Interpretative theories and approaches on the Italian Mezzogiorno: a diachronic perspective’, developed by the author for DGRegio. Ideas presented in this paper are exclusively those of the author.

ABSTRACT

Since the unification of the country in 1861, Italy has faced a large North–South divide, which persists despite the huge efforts made to determine the reasons for its existence. This paper has the aim of building a unified, coherent and logically structured theoretical review of theories and approaches that have dealt with the backwardness of the South of Italy. It further assesses the extent these are able to highlight the reasons for the emergence of a particular interpretation, the reasons for its failure once applied at a normative level, and for the rise of the subsequent theoretical interpretation. A logical storyline in the development of thought on the Mezzogiorno emerges on building the theoretical framework from a diachronic perspective, and policy lessons can be learnt.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional growth theories
• regional backwardness
• regional policy lessons
• South of Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

† This paper is mostly based on a study entitled ‘Interpretative theories and approaches on the Italian Mezzogiorno: a diachronic perspective’, developed by the author for DGRegio. Ideas presented in this paper are exclusively those of the author.

1. The normative side of regional growth theories turned out to be in most cases less successful than expected not only in the Mezzogiorno case, witnessing the complexity that exists to translate theories into practice.

2. Territorial capital is defined as the set of assets – material, immaterial, human, cognitive, social and institutional – that represent the potential competitive advantage of each territory (Camagni, 2009).