“The situation is serious, the most serious since the Second World War. And it requires a particularly severe commitment to put Italy back on the road to development. But it must be clear to everyone that there can be neither recovery nor development in the whole country if the age-old and never resolved issue of the North-South divide is not placed at the center of political action”. This was stated by Carlo Trigilia, professor of economic sociology at the "Cesare Alfieri" in Florence and minister for territorial cohesion for six months, speaking at the presentation of the 2013 Svimez Report.
A document full of data and analysis, which this year has reached a thousand round pages and which, observes Giorgio Napolitano in the message sent to the president of Svimez Adriano Giannola, shows "a disturbing picture of the economic and social conditions of the South". A picture that "arouses growing concern due to the overwhelming lack of job opportunities and prospects for the future". And which, especially among young people, fuels "mistrust, if not giving up". With the consequence that at this point many emigrate to the North or abroad (2,7 million people, underlines the Report) further impoverishing "an essential heritage of human resources" in the South. A picture that leads the head of state to hope for "the launch of a new process of national development based on the great energies and human capacities present in the South".
This is the key that the President of the Republic keeps suggesting to use to begin to reduce the gap between the two Italys. The dimensions of which have expanded further in recent years, as the director of Svimez Riccardo Padovani testified in his introductory speech with a wealth of figures and evaluations. Who calls for the implementation of "an industrial policy aimed at strategic investments to support the relaunch of the manufacturing sector" as well as "the activation of differentiated taxation in favor of the South". In other words, he says, "two crucial tools for kick-starting the recovery and for reversing the decline in employment".
The minister moves along the same line. “There can be no recovery in Italy – he maintains – if the historical knot of the development of the South is not resolved. That is, a theme that seems to have disappeared or at least removed”.
That South, observes the president of Svimez Adriano Giannola, "is an area that presents great opportunities, and yet it is also the branch on which we are sitting but which today we are sawing and which is therefore destined to collapse, dragging us to the ground too".
Even Giannola, like and more than Trigilia, spares no criticism of the European rules. “Not to blame the euro, but – he specifies – due to the absence of what should exist alongside the single currency: a tax system, if not exactly single, at least harmonized. Because twenty-eight different regimes in a union of states is blasphemy for an economist. And, above all, in a Europe where seventeen countries coexist linked by a single currency; and consequently obliged to comply with strict rules; while the other eleven can unscrupulously use the weapon of devaluation of the national currency in a competitive and penalizing key towards those of the Eurozone. And they can calibrate the national tax system to attract foreign investment”.
Still on the subject of penalties originating from European policies, standards and practices, the president of Svimez points out another one that concerns us closely. “Italy – he says – is a great benefactor in the EU but a relatively small recipient of EU financial aid. Basically, as a result of a bureaucratic and I would say baroque mechanism that charges the national share of co-financing of the structural funds to the public deficit, it transfers more than it receives to the European budget. In short, the more European funds it collects, the more it risks exceeding the ceiling of 3% of the deficit/GDP ratio”.
On this issue, the Minister for Territorial Cohesion defines himself as "less rigid than Giannola". But not even he is soft on European rules and the way they are applied. “Europe is important, but – he points out – it cannot become a cage, the design of European integration must be forcefully re-proposed, even by beating our fists on the table, to our European partners. Otherwise those rules risk turning out to be counterproductive”.
And, as for the recipes for a better use of the structural funds for the financial seven-year period that opens on January 2014st, Carlo Trigilia anticipates that "in the 2020-80 financial programming, XNUMX% of European funds will be distributed concentrating them on four or five objectives . In this way we will avoid the dispersion of those resources in a thousand streams: in short, no to the jam of initiatives. Above all, we can no longer afford it. And furthermore, while respecting the prerogatives of the Regions and Municipalities, we are developing a form of coordination through the Agency for territorial cohesion".
Finally, as regards the energy prospects of the South, some interesting indications arise from the intervention of Gianluca Comin, director of external relations of Enel. “In less than ten years – he says – the South has transformed itself from an importer into an exporter of electricity, thanks to the increase in conventional production capacity and the boom in renewables (solar and wind in the first row)”.
“The goal for the future – he says – is a sustainable mix from both an environmental and an economic point of view. This is a challenge which can be met both with an improvement in energy efficiency and with urban regeneration interventions and through the effect of the growth of renewables. Without underestimating the observation that the South, due to its geographical position, is the natural outpost for an energy policy, both Italian and European, projected into the Mediterranean”.
