Southern Italy

Abstract

The article tries to identify the causes of Southern Italy’s economic and civic backwardness, and to indicate possible solutions. The causes, in the author’s opinion, are related to the deficiencies of the economic system of private enterprise and to the absence of a policy for restoring the economic balance, to the growing disparity between resources and population, to the lack of “cumulative” environmental factors: all of which are conditions that tend to perpetuate and aggravate the poverty and inferiority of the South. As a remedy to these problems, the author proposes and develops the idea of the “industrialization” of the South. Such a solution would imply not only an initial stage of large-scale pubic works, but also the elimination of dangerous bottlenecks, the coordination of industrial development with rehabilitation work in other sectors, and the concentration of the remedial activities in limited zones. According to the author, the preliminary and essential conditions for facing the task are: renovated legislation; a single organ provided with power to act and full responsibility for the execution of the reforms; complete inventories of the needs of each region accompanied by specific and graduated plans of action.

JEL: O11, O14, O20