Le due Italie: una spiegazione del divario tra Centro-Nord e Mezzogiorno

Abstract

In a recent volume (Perche il Sud e rimasto indietro, il Mulino, Bologna) the historian Emanuele Felice presented “a long-term socio-institutional explanation” of the more than secular permanence of the significant gap in per capita GDP – and in other indicators of modernization – between the regions of Centre-North and Southern Italy. His argument allows a new, original, appreciation of the greater problem of united Italy. Its explanans regards a) the inequality of incomes, personal wealth, as well as opportunities for “access to culture” between the two macro-areas, and b) the characteristics and modus operandi of the economic and political local institutions. According to Felice, institutions in the South are mainly “extractive”; in the North Centre, instead, “inclusive” (Acemoglu and Robinson).In this review, I try to integrate some topics not developed by Felice: the concept of modernization; the fragility of the ruling classes of the southern regions, which needs the consent of other social groups – not least the mafias; the prevalence in the South of a coalition that opposes modernization projects; the low level of real education of the ruling classes of Southern Italy (data elaborated from the Piacc/Oecd study, 2011); the differences in social stratification between the North Centre and the Mezzogiorno.Unless a decisive increase in the human capital available to the Italians of the South – above all, but certainly not only, of their ruling classes – an endogenous economic development in these regions seems quite problematic. Just as civil development will continue to be slow unless there is a decisive contrast to organized crime.