When, now several years ago, I was working at Il Mattino di Napoli, I wrote a series of articles to support the thesis that "Naples and the South were our future": and this is because the whole of Italy could have become like our South by starting to stagnation and underdevelopment, and, on the contrary, for the potential that our South could express by also boosting the growth of the entire country.
Since then, the South has entered a phase of oblivion not only in concrete economic policies, but also in debate. Boredom and annoyance at hearing about the South prevailed in the North, and a feeling of skepticism and resignation spread among the Southerners themselves, so much so that some economist friends such as Viesti and Lo Cicero wrote books entitled ” Abolire il Mezzogiorno ” or ” Sud : vacuum to lose".
And instead it is not rhetorical to say that it is precisely there that we are at stake for the future. We cannot expect to grow as much as the rest of Europe leaving twenty million of our fellow citizens behind!
But to do this we need to understand how to act without being distracted by false targets and without paying attention to those whom FS Nitti called a century ago the "somethings", those who ONLY ask for support and subsidies. Indeed, it is clear that the fate of the South depends not so much on the quantity of public spending, but on its quality. Analyzes show that in the past decades investments have been, as a percentage of GDP, higher than those in other areas of the country, but the results have not been seen and the huge resources allocated to the southern regions have vanished like "water in the desert". And this is because there is no social and economic network capable of holding it back and making it bear fruit. This obviously this does not mean that public investments must not be made, but that they must be aimed at increasing the productivity of businesses and of work.
This decree for the South represents a significant “change of pace”. Other interventions will have to follow, but in the same direction and with the same logic.
After all, there is no economic justification, much less an anthropological flaw, which prevents the South from raising productivity to levels of the rest of the country, which are not yet satisfactory for facing international competition.
Lo Fiat's Pomigliano plant has achieved the primacy among the group's plants in the world in terms of quantity and quality of production. This is the result of well-made investments and agreements on labor productivity signed by forward-looking trade unions against the ideological and politically losing castle of Landini's Fiom. The high production prize awarded to the workers demonstrates that productivity not only does not compress rights, but allows for significant wage increases. Moreover, as Svimez's studies show, the good growth of the South in the last two years is concentrated in Campania and Basilicata. The recovery of the automotive sector is certainly not extraneous to it, while in other regions such as the Puglia, where populist demagoguery dominates, growth remains anchored at modest zero point.
In the decree, the urgency of which is also justified by a series of measures aimed at solving the emergency in Taranto or in the areas affected by the earthquake, there are significant innovations as regards the financing of youth entrepreneurship, the creation of Special Economic Zones, the contrast early school leaving, job placement and above all support for southern administrations. In fact, bureaucracy and lack of political leadership are certainly the greatest evils afflicting our South.
Already over a century ago FS Nitti (whose reading or re-reading could be useful for re-establishing policies for the South on the correct basis) noted that in the South "there is no suitable environment for a real take-off of a modern economy". Here is the heart of a renewed intervention towards the southern regions, it should be precisely that of create this "friendly" environment for those who want to undertake.
To continue on the road opened by this decree it would be necessary to work around two big themes: infrastructure projects carefully examined on the productivity of the investment and rehabilitation and rebirth of the cities which are the place where the relationships and services essential to a modern productive system develop. This would give that skeleton to a vast territory which, as noted by the great historian Peppino Galasso, today lacks those load-bearing structures that should allow it to move independently.
Naturally something is being done: Bagnoli or the railway planare examples. But we need to find a way to steer local authorities in the right direction. It will not be easy. It will be necessary to adopt a mixture of rigor and incentives, starting with being strict with the regions full of debts such as Sicily, for example, where major maneuvers are underway between the parties in view of the November elections, but where no one has so far said that what should be done to avoid bankruptcy (predicted by the Court of Auditors) beyond the usual request for more money in Rome.
It will be necessary to avoid that the culture of the southerners in the face of difficulties falls back on an autarky based on real or presumed specificities. Thus local administrators arise such as the mayor of Naples, who directs the desire for change of the masses towards an improbable Neapolitan republic, de facto detaching the city from the flow of globality.
With this decree the work has started well. But already in the coming months it is necessary to continue to study new solutions to support the growth of the South and with it that of Italy as a whole.
