Abstract

The divergences between Southern regions and dynamic European areas stems from the following fundamental hypotheses concerning the difficulty of their development in an «open economy framework» and the lack of economic policies focused on the priority of such divergences. After nearly half a century, today this approach performs much better even in the presence of an irreversible mutation of the context where this idea was developed: today a structural crisis follows the «growth age» of an open European economy; the «Southern Question» and its sometimes ritual priorities are removed despite a deep stagnation in the South of Italy; the national economic policies are replaced, or deleted, by the constraints imposed by the currency area which itself is still not able to react to the economic crisis that it contributed to generate. Despite this changing context, we propose that the processes underlying growth dualism some decades ago are quite similar to the processes that led to divergences in the current recession: the «recession-led dualism» is a new version of the «export-led growth». The reference to recent interpretative models, such as that of resilience and regional hysteresis in Italy, has therefore allowed to verify this hypothesis and to reconsider the dualism between the Southern regions and Northern regions in terms of their ability to resist economic shocks and recovery in post crisis periods.