Citizenship income is not the lever for the development of the South

One cannot fail to agree with Francesco Drago and Lucrezia Reichlin who, in the Corriere of 21 October, after noting that in the budget planning document of the current the government mentions the Mezzogiorno only twice (in relation to the cycle path project from the Brenner Pass to Palermo and the combination of food and wine and tourism), have irrefutably demonstrated the only welfare meaning of the "citizenship income". The analysis of the two authors adds to those of numerous others who in recent weeks, for various reasons, have argued that this was not the lever for determine the development of the South. In this way, on the contrary, the economic policy of the government is stiffened, the risk of slowing down the recovery trend of the southern and national economy is determined as very probable, it is made impossible to reach the pre-crisis level of production and employment , resources are used in directions other than those that would be necessary to start addressing the problems that are shaping an extraordinarily worrying future for the South, full of negative repercussions for the whole country.

There is no doubt that it is spreading in the South a real social emergency (which, among other things, albeit to a lesser extent, also affects the centre-north) and which consists of:

a) a demographic impoverishment numerical and dramatic generational. It is expected that in the next fifty years the Italian population will decrease by about 7 million, of which -1.9 in the Centre-North and as much as -5.3 in the South, where it will go from the current 20 to 15 million people, with an old age index that would increase from 161 % to 275%.

b) a growing level of poverty. 10 Southerners out of 100 are in conditions of absolute poverty (there were 5 in 2006) and 6 in the Centre-North (there were 2.4), generally concentrated in the urban suburbs.
c) an exclusion of young people from work. The employment rate of young people went from 35.8% in 2008 to 28.5% in 2016 (59.8% and 48.1% respectively in the Centre-North).

c) a persistent depletion of human capital. From 2002 to 2016, the Mezzogiorno saw the emigration of 565 young people (out of 783 in Italy) of which 164 were university graduates (219 in total).

And all of this is taking place while a transformation process is underway that is profoundly affecting production models and the global economic system.

The alternative is clear for the South: one can look at these phenomena as structural data of an area irremediably destined to stagnation or, on the contrary, consider them profound criticalities and dramatic contradictions, typical of the composite contemporary societies that are confronted everywhere, in the current global dimension, with similar problems. It is a question of choosing whether or not to participate, as an Italian system including the South, in the construction of the future that is taking shape on a global scale.

The Mezzogiorno is not destined for a perpetual condition of structural lag. We are facing an economy which, through a radical transformation, and despite the criticisms repeatedly denounced, has left behind a terrible reality of widespread poverty and social and productive backwardness, and which today constitutes a significant part of the Italian economy : Southern GDP is larger than the GDP of Greece and Portugal combined. At the national level, the Mezzogiorno is an integral part of the Made in Italy, of the tourism system, of the cultural and environmental heritage, it is an important component of international trade, it almost represents a third of the country's agricultural production, has technologically advanced points in manufacturing, exercises an authoritative and recognized presence in the world of knowledge and research.

In addition, even if in a national and international context of great uncertainty, and despite the strong social emergency, the South, as noted by Svimez, consolidated in the three-year period 2015-17 a growth trend comparable to that of the rest of the country, driven by exports, agro-food consumption, the stability of tourism (drastically decreased in the Mediterranean) and the recovery of the added value of the manufacturing sector. Confindustria-SRM itself, confirming this, recorded for two consecutive years the positive trend of the synthetic index of the southern economy which takes into account the wealth produced, employment, number of businesses, exports, investments (+15 points only in 2017). And he identified interesting signs of vitality in the southern business world as a whole, especially those online, innovative start-ups and youthful ones.

Some lights, therefore, and many shadows which, together, push to counter the multi-year fall in attention to what is a problem in Italy today. In recent decades we have gone from the extraordinary to the removal of intervention for the South, and economic policy has not made the cohesion action an integral and additional component of the overall development action.

Faced with that a donation of money to reach 780 euros per capita it is, to say the least, insufficient and superficial. Instead, it is necessary to set up a range of social policies aimed at combating the lack of income upstream, with actions that affect the education and training systems, with monetary benefits for children, for school, for periods of unemployment, to support rentals. But, above all, we need to decide what we want the current South to be and what we can do as an Italian system, acting in differential terms for the South but with a national vision. The topics to work on are: relaunch of public investments, reform of cohesion policies, continuation of Industry 4.0, new jobs, close connection between Research and Business for the transfer of technological innovation, active location in the Mediterranean area.