Regional divide, ‘Southern Question’ and economic development in Italy 1950-1992: The role of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno by Stefano Palermo
The issue of territorial divides is at the centre of a vast international literature that, moving from the spread of the problem in a multiplicity of countries or within apparently more homogeneous areas (such as Europe), has taken on the centrality of the theme in order to elucidate certain essential elements of the behaviour of contemporary economies and societies. In this context, the importance of some transitional phases has been highlighted; while marking the evolution of the global economic system, these phases have at the same time affected the development of regional differentiations within different countries or international geo-economic arcs. A significant attempt to intersect the specificities of national pathways with changes in the general context was made by Joan Rosés and Nikolaus Wolf [Rosés and Wolf 2018a and 2018 b]. In addition to collecting and presenting the experiences of numerous regional and national cases, the two authors place the topic in a long-run reading of structural changes in development processes. Analysing a relevant amount of data and quantitative sources from 173 European regional areas, for example, they highlight the caesura of the 1980s. The long-run curve shows a ‘U-shaped’ tendency in the second half of the twentieth century, due first to the descent of the indices measuring the gaps and then to the ‘rebound’ in the last phase of the twentieth century, when a resurgence of internal distances between many territorial areas became evident. This theme is linked, in several respects, to studies concerning the resurgence of inequalities recorded in Western countries in terms of income and wealth concentration over the same period [Milanovic 2010 and 2016; Picketty 2014].
