The North and South Divide Italian Regional

Disparities
The major area division in Italy is between the North and South portions of the country and the other two islands
namely Sicily and Sardinia. The Northern part is the prosperous and highly industrialized one while the Southern
portion remains to be poor. This problem between these two regions started hundreds of years ago and the situation
became more intense as the outcome of the policy options made during the 1860s, the period of Italys unification.
The Northern part of Italy conquered the economy and political aspects of the country. This industrialized region
wants to gain protection from the competition that is currently happening outside the country. Due to that, a high tariff
system was enforced. A higher cost of tariff comes with imported meat which is one of those products produced by
the South.
The tariff promoters from the Northern region felt that their tariffs were giving security of the Souths economy in the
same way it does to their region. The expensive cost of wheat offer benefits to the farms from the South but those
farms are also producing some products to be sold in France. If France will not be selling its products inside of Italy
then that foreign country will never be able to buy crops from the farmers who live in the South. It only means that the
existing problem of the South has been made more serious by the economic policy implemented by the North.
Disparities between these two regions are usually attributed to some biological and behavioral factors and these
inequalities come with deep roots within the lay of the territory.

The North/South divide in Italy and England:

Discursive construction of regional inequality
1.

Sara Gonzlez
1. University of Leeds, UK, s.gonzalez@leeds.ac.uk

Abstract
Despite the entrenched and long-term nature of the Italian and English North/South divide, this has not always
been considered a relevant scale at which to redress spatial inequalities. To explain this apparent conundrum,
this paper has two interlinked aims: (1) to investigate why, how, for whom and when the North/South divide is
held to be a relevant policy geography and (2) to explain the accompanying debates about the internal
geography of this North/South divide. To do this, the paper develops a cultural politics of scales approach that
compares the discursive (re)construction of the North/South divide in Italy and England by focusing on key
moments, particularly the Keynesian consensus after the Second World War and the more current turn to
neoliberal policies. Two parallel trends are identified: that support for an interventionist state and regional
subsidies to poorer regions has decreased and that the North/South divide as a dual national partition has been
dissolved into a micro-diverse geography. The paper concludes that the North/South divide is a contested
political geography interpreted in different ways and used as a discursive device by different actors to fit wider
political projects.

North-South Divide in Italy: A Problem for Europe, Too

CROTONE, Italy As the capital of a province with an unemployment rate of 33 percent,
the highest in Italy, the last thing Crotone needed was the recent flash floods that knocked
out its bridges, flooded its basements with mud and shut down its few remaining factories.
Damage was estimated at $300 million.
But Crotone, at the bottom of the Italian boot where the isolated region of Calabria faces the
Ionian Sea, has hopes that the latest natural disaster could bring it what it craves most:
more assistance from Rome. This time, however, officials here say they are determined to
avoid the kind of squandering of public money for which southern regions like this became
famous.
''With this misfortune, God has given the political class the chance to redeem itself,'' said
Gaetano Grillo, the Mayor of Crotone, a forlorn shadow of the port founded by the Greeks in
the eighth century B.C.
After World War II, in an attempt to develop the Mezzogiorno, the region that starts south
of Rome and ends in Sicily, the Italian Government sent billions of dollars southward for
ambitious public works projects. But instead of spurring development, the Cassa per il
Mezzogiorno, as the fund was known, succeeded best at spawning more corruption and
mismanagement. Many of the jobs it created had evaporated by 1993, when the fund was
shut down under a cascade of scandals.
That wastefulness -- and the culture of dependence and passivity it encouraged -- has only
spurred resentment in Italy's rich north, helping fan a secessionist movement led by
Umberto Bossi, who regularly insults the south and southerners.

Now, many say, the divide between north and south -- the curse of Italian unity since the
nation was formed in 1870 -- has never been greater. And that split augurs ill for Italy as a
whole as it tries to put its financial house in order, seeking to be among the first countries to
adopt a common European currency in 1999.
''The problem of the Mezzogiorno is not just an Italian problem but a European problem,''
Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Italy's current Treasury Minister and former Prime Minister, wrote in
a preface to a recent book on Europe's unemployment crisis.
The economic gap between the rich industrialized north and the poor, more agrarian south
has widened in recent years. Unemployment in the south as a whole has gone from 18.7
percent in 1993 to 21.4 percent in July 1996, while joblessness in northern Italy at midyear
was only about 6.2 percent.
Other statistics collected by Svimez, a state-run research institute specializing on the
Mezzogiorno, show that the average southerner spends 68 percent of what a northerner
spends, while investment in the south is 55 percent of what it is in the north.
On most statistical breakdowns, Calabria -- a region cut off by rugged mountains and a
mostly undeveloped coastline, its population drained by a century of emigration -- tends to
come in last place. In one recent article, it was called the ''rear light of the Italian economy.''
''The idea of two Italys was not invented by Bossi,'' said Mariano Lombardi, the chief antiMafia prosecutor for the region. ''It is a reality. In the north you see one factory per
kilometer. Here you can travel for 100 kilometers and not see one chimney stack.''
$2.6 Billion in Aid Adds Up to Failure
Attempts by successive Italian governments to prop up the economy here are now regarded
locally as a giant failure. Calabria, a region with a population of barely two million, received
$2.56 billion from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno from 1988 to 1993. Today its landscape is
littered with the results: bits of unfinished highways with cloverleaf interchanges that go
nowhere, hospitals that never opened, factories that never started hiring.
''Before, the system was based on handouts, and it created a sore wound whose
consequences we still feel,'' said Francesco Nistico, the recently elected president of the
Calabria region. ''We should have tried to give incentives to small and medium businesses
rather than just accepting welfare.''

The reasons for Calabria's economic backwardness are deep and old, traceable to a history
marked by a succession of foreign invasions, and by the feudal order of the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilys that ruled the region until it was forcibly brought into a united Italy. Some of
this legacy is evident today, like the lawlessness that still reigns in some isolated
mountainous areas, much as it did when bands of brigands were fighting the Italian Army.
There was a time when Crotone was a ''happy island'' within Calabria's somnolent economy,
local industrialists say. In the 1920's, several major investors, including the French
Rothschilds, came to town, building up chemical, lumber and mineral-processing
industries, taking advantage of the region's cheap energy and cheap labor. Here, unlike the
rest of Calabria, the old Communist Party grew big enough to challenge the regional
dominance of Italy's governing Christian Democrats.
Air of Prosperity Masks Depression
Trouble began in the 1960's, when the state began to take over the local industries. Its
managers failed to anticipate certain market developments, like a downturn in the
international fertilizer market, and, by the 1980's, jobs here began to disappear.
A recent effort to lure new investors with a package of tax incentives and subsidies may now
be derailed by the emergency created by the floods, which some fear will drain off the public
money.

ITALYS NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE: Patterns and drivers of regional income

inequality, 1871-2001
Date:
28 Mar 2015

Full Text:
New research presents the first reliable estimates of Italys regional GDP over the past century and
more. Among the findings of the study by Emanuele Felice, presented at the Economic History
Societys 2015 annual conference, is that in the second half of the twentieth century, the North-East
and the centre of the country converged towards the North-West, while Southern Italy lagged
behind. As a consequence, Italy is now divided into two halves: the Centre-North and the South.

Italys regional disparities are renowned throughout the world, in academia and beyond. In 1861, the
unification of the peninsula was an event of paramount importance for the history of nineteenth
century Europe. Southern Italy was the most backward part of the country and has remained so until
the present day. What strikes the observer, however, is that it has gained a firm position as a
paradigmatic case of a backward society and there is probably no other part of the Western world
that can boast such dubious fame.
Before unification, in 1851, William Gladstone had famously defined the southern kingdom as the
negation of God erected into a system of government. Following unification, Alexander Dumas, one
of the greatest novelists of his time, established himself in Naples and his regular reports helped to
create the image of a savage south that was prey to organised crime, where murder is just a
gesture.
Soon after, Italian scholars also began to discuss the questione meridionale (the problem of the
South) Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci are some of the names who took part in the debate.
This has continued up to the present day, and has spread to popular culture as well, including
cinema and novels; prominent international scholars, from Edward Banfield to Robert Putnam, also
delivered important works on the Italian North-South divide.
Up to recent years, however, such a remarkable interest contrasted with the lack of reliable
information about the evolution of regional disparities at least for what concerns the most important
economic indicator, GDP (that is, income) per person.
By making profit of several and recent step forwards in this direction, this study for the first time
presents reliable estimates of Italys regional GDP (at the NUTS II level), from 1871 to 2001. It also
proposes a new interpretative hypothesis for the persisting North-South divide, which is based on
long-lasting socio-institutional differences.
At a time when all of Italy was a poor country, regional differences in GDP were relatively mild. Since
the late nineteenth century, they have increased, first at a slower pace and then, in the interwar
years, with greater speed.
By the time regional inequality reached its peak, around 1951, Italy appeared to be divided into three
thirds: the industrialised North-West, the regions of the North-East and Centre close to the Italian
average, and the backward South.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the North-East and the Centre converged towards the
North-West, while Southern Italy lagged behind: as a consequence, Italy is now parted into two
halves, the Centre-North and the South.
The timing and modality of these patterns suggest that geographical factors and the market size
played a minor role: for instance, the worst-performing Italian region is Campania, by far the most
favoured in the South in terms of geographical position and market size.
Rather, the gradual converging of regional GDPs towards two equilibria seems to follow the social
and institutional imbalances of pre-unification Italy: by 1861, there was a socio-institutional divide
in the levels of human and social capital as well as in the nature and functioning of the political and
economic institutions which was transferred to the new state, in different forms, and since then it
has not been overcome (indeed, it has even been reinforced).
The paramount examples are organised crime in some southern regions regarding economic
institutions, and the widespread cronyism in the south concerning the working of political institutions;
both go along with the renowned differences in social capital. This socio-institutional divide appears
to be the ultimate determinant behind Italys regional inequality.
ENDS