Abstract

The aim of the paper is to sketch an overall view of the changes occurred over the last fifty years in the regional (NUTS 2) and «provincial» (NUTS 3) distribution of manufacturing activities in Italy, at the NACE 3-digit level. In this perspective the paper shows that as far as the long-run dynamics of employment growth in manufacturing has come to an end, it has become more and more difficult to identify something like a direction, at the spatial level, of industrial development, up to the point that no clear pattern of spatial industrialisation can be found in the years in which employment growth has become negative. Peculiar attention is paid to the changes that have taken place in the new Century, due to the role played by the globalisation of manufacturing activities and the deep effects of the financial crisis, which have been initially paralleled by a slowdown of manufacturing employment growth and then by an outright shrink in its overall size.