Infrastructures have been one of Italy's Achilles heels for decades and for this reason they are at the center of the investments of the PNRR: whether they are economic (transport, telecommunications, energy, water network, etc.) or social (schools, hospitals, waste disposal etc) Italy has a great need to renew its infrastructure, relaunching public investments which, moreover, have been in continuous and drastic decline from 2009 to today. To testify it is an occasional paper published by some researchers of the Bank of Italy, which shows first of all that the resources allocated to public expenditure for gross fixed investments (net of real estate disposals) and capital account transfers to companies was 4,5% of GDP 12 years ago , while today it is below 3% with the share of the South and Islands which has further decreased and continues to decline since 2015, while the Center and North experienced a small jolt around 2018, the latest data available.
This is also what the Bank of Italy study talks about: the North-South infrastructure gap, at various levels. Generally speaking, the maps used by central bank economists almost always show a darker color (i.e. more infrastructure or more efficient) in the North, particularly in Lombardy, then inexorably lightening as one proceeds towards the South. Often not even Rome, which is the capital of the country and around which there is a metropolitan area of several million inhabitants, is spared from the delay or inefficiency of the networks of essential services. There is actually an exception and it is that of the telecommunications network: no, it is not true that the South is much further behind than the North. Both the map of telecommunication infrastructures fixed network and mobile network infrastructures, unlike others, are patchy: according to Agcom data used by Bank of Italy, the ratio between the number of families with the possibility of accessing a network at speeds of at least 30 or 100 Mbps and the number of households in the area is almost higher in some southern provinces, in particular Puglia and Sicily.
The so-called white areas, the remote ones where a good Internet connection does not yet arrive, are scattered almost everywhere in the country but often and willingly concentrated precisely in the North, in the Alpine arc. In any case, the whole country is lagging behind: "With reference to the objective of the plan launched by the government in 2015 - writes the Bank of Italy research -, i.e. 85 percent of the population covered by the ultra-fast service by 2020, we are practically at
less than halfway, with an undersized infrastructure compared to the main European countries”. It doesn't get better as far as Transports, for which the study uses the criterion ofaccessibility index, which measures the possibility for companies or individuals operating in a given area to easily reach the most important economic outlets, represented for example by places with the highest added value or by those with a higher population density. In this case, yes, there is a North-South divide, both at road and rail level, and at the port or airport level.
For ports and airports, Rome and the South defend themselves only for passenger traffic, obviously thanks to tourism (in normal times, that is). As far as freight transport is concerned, the heart of everything remains the Po Valley, above all the Lombardy-Emilia axis. Returning to roads and railways, it must be noted that high speed is decisive in terms of times: in fact, the map does not exclude one good coverage of some southern areas, which, not surprisingly, are those already covered by the most efficient railway network, such as Lazio and Campania. This is why it will be important to bring High Speed to the South and to the Islands and the Recovery Plan intends to do this, inaugurating several new connections in hitherto forgotten areas, such as Basilicata for example. Even the functioning of the electricity distribution network is much better in the North than in the South. Through an indicator that is calculated as the average number of interruptions without warning (transient, short and long) per user, a clear difference can be seen between the Lombardy-Emilia-Veneto triangle and almost all of the South .
The same goes for the water supply, which actually works well in almost all of Italy but the few flaws are right from Abruzzo downwards: Abruzzo itself, part of Campania and above all third world situations in Calabria and Sicily, with evidently lower volumes supplied and several capitals subject to rationing, with the service several times reduced or suspended during the year. For the hospitals, or rather the hospital infrastructures, the scheme with the Po valley at the center of everything is confirmed, both for overall beds and for beds in intensive care. The data concerns both public and accredited structures in the area. The pandemic has shown us that even in the North, especially in Lombardy, something in healthcare has not worked, but the hospital facility endowment index confirms greater availability in the North. The worst regions are instead Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia. The hospital infrastructure endowment index weighted by the quality of care also shows the same colour: very dark in the North, white in the South.
Finally, waste disposal. In fact, the waste cycle also requires adequate infrastructure. Here the North-South divide is very clear in the management of Organic waste, which are decisive for the production of clean energy and the ecological transition. For the undifferentiated, however, the networks of the Center are also valid, while the South is behind in any case: once again bringing up the rear are Calabria and the Islands.
