A Unified Approach for the Development of the South of Italy

The Italian Mezzogiorno is an outstanding negative example of conditional convergence in productivity. In the last forty years the policy incentives have produced no catching up of the South per capita income which still equals 60 per cent of the rest of the country. The relevant theoretical and empirical novelties emerged in the literature of the last ten years have regarded the joint effects on productivity of investment in R&D, innovative systems and spillovers. But productivity, as well as governance, are not the main issues here. It is argued that the real change which may enhance the development of Mezzogiorno asks for a fully fledged unified approach based on a twofold change of policy. It should be based either on the fulfillment of adequate “social filter” conditions aimed to remove the obstacles responsible for too long of the missed opportunities of Mezzogiorno’s development or on the design of an incentives structure aimed to fight the local unemployment by reinforcing the competitive supply of goods and services locally produced.