Italy is a country that operates at two speeds. A significant feature of the Italian economy is the enormous and persistent gap that exists between the north and south of the country. The per capita income of the north is almost double that of the south, according to the latest report from the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat). The per capita income of the southern regions corresponds around 55-58% to that of the central-northern regions of the country. The richest region is the northern Trentino-Alto Adige, with 40,904 euros of GDP per capita, while the southern Calabria occupies last place, with 16,168 euros.
Ending the pronounced differences between the north and the south is one of the most complex issues that the country has faced since the unification of 1871. Already in the first decades of life of the united Italy, institutions and experts began to analyze this phenomenon and to look for possible remedies, without much success, because the most recent data continue to reveal an increasingly marked gap. “The analyzes of the gaps between the south and the center-north of the country that have occurred over time have systematically documented, on the one hand, the weakness of the southern productive system and, on the other, the deficiencies in infrastructure and services public that, together with the presence of criminal phenomena, contribute to hindering the economic development of the area,” says the Bank of Italy in its latest report for 2022. And it warns that its analyzes show an increasingly worrying panorama, since “The differences have widened and the southern question has become even more clearly part of a broader national problem.”
Southern Italy has traditionally been hard-pressed to keep up with the rest of the country, and has seen its economic weight progressively decline. Some of its greatest burdens are the growing difficulty in employing available labor, a reduction in capital accumulation or lower demographic growth compared to the most advanced areas of the country, where internal migratory flows are concentrated. “Southern Italy is the largest backward territory in the euro zone, which has suffered the great crisis of 2008 and, more recently, the impact of the pandemic,” summarizes the National Statistics Institute. Forecasts say that southern Italy will grow three times less than northern Italy this year.
The demographic decline and depopulation of the south, where around 20 million people live, a third of the country’s total population, is of particular concern. Experts estimate that in 2023 the Italian population will be almost a million fewer people than in 2019, more than half of them in the southern regions alone.
The labor market figures are not more favorable. While in almost all northern provinces, the occupancy rate reaches or exceeds 70%, in the south the number of employed people is barely around 40%. Inequalities also reach youth employment. In 2021, in the north 8 out of every 10 young people had jobs, compared to nearly 5 out of 10 in the south who were employed.
In the south of Italy, where the infrastructure network is also inferior to the north in quality and quantity, there is a notable lag in the level of education compared to the northern part of the country. Although this problem is improving in the younger generations, the disadvantage is still very large. In 2022, 42.7% of secondary school students in the south had “very weak” skills in mathematics, compared to 15% in the north and only 6.7% of southern students had a “very good” level in this subject, compared to 22.6% of students in the north.
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