Abstract

Several studies have highlighted how, during the first 35 years following WWII a substantial reduction of the socioeconomic gap between Southern Italy and the rest of the country has occurred, whereas since the early 1990s the convergence process has come to an end, despite the very relevant transformations reported both in the social and productive structure of the South and in its relations to the North. The reasons for the convergence observed in the first period and for the resumption of divergence in the second may be traced back to three factors: first, broader contextual variables, external to the South, such as the structural trends of Western capitalism and the position of the Italian economy; second, the entity, the architecture and the aims of public policies deployed to bridge the gap over time; third, endogenous factors such as the productive structure and the infrastructural endowment, but especially immaterial factors such as the entrepreneurial, social and institutional capital. The essay retraces the evolution of the «Southern Question» from the end of WWII to date, in the broader context of the transformations of Western capitalism, focusing especially on the second order of factors – i.e. the characteristics of public intervention. In the first section, a heuristic representation of the two policy «regimes» that unfolded in Europe after WWII is proposed: the «Fordist-Keynesian» regime and the «Neo-liberal» regime. In the second and third sections a reassessment of the evolution of regional policies and the socioeconomic transformations in Southern Italy is offered, in the light of the main analytical parameters identified in the review of the two regimes. In the last section some key questions are raised, to better appraise a number of policy failures observed in recent public interventions and to address the current challenges.