Abstract

Recent data on the traditional North-South dualistic divide in Italy clearly reveal the halt of any convergence process, with the per capita GDP gap in the Mezzogiorno returning to its historical levels, i.e. around 60% of the North-Centre. The resources mobilized within European policies for regional cohesion do not thus appear to have fulfilled expectations. In this contribution, using macroeconomic time series constructed separately for the two broad regional aggregations of the Italian economy (the North-Centre and Mezzogiorno), we stress the importance of the different patterns of capital accumulation in the two areas over the period 1980-2007, and their scarce effectiveness in terms of contributions to productivity gains, in particular in Southern Italy and in the most recent period, characterized by enhanced conditions of global competition and full integration within the EMU.