Workshop, October 11-12, 2024, University of Palermo, Italy

Despite the regional divide between northern and southern Italy reaching levels comparable only to the period immediately following World War II, the «Southern Question» is increasingly marginal in the Italian political agenda. However, over the past decade, there has been renewed interest in quantitatively reconstructing the historical roots and evolution of this divide within economic history. Emanuele Felice’s book Perchè il Sud è rimasto indietro (2014) offered a detailed examination of the disparity from the time of Italian unification using new regional GDP estimates, proposing a socio-institutional explanation for the disparity between the north and the south. The renewed debate has led to the reconstruction of various indicators that support or challenge this interpretation, sometimes extending the temporal horizon to periods preceding 1861. Examples include estimates of human capital (Cappelli 2017; Ciccarelli and Weisdorf 2018; Cappelli and Vasta 2020), wages (Federico, Nuvolari, and Vasta 2019; Fiore Melacrinis 2024; Buscemi 2024), innovation (Nuvolari and Vasta 2017), Human Development Index (Iuzzolino, Pellegrini and Viesti 2013; Felice and Vasta 2015) market access (A’Hearn and Venables 2013; Missiaia 2019), and occupational structure (Ciccarelli and Chilosi 2022). This workshop aims to explore the origins, evolution, and impacts of the regional divide from a historical perspective, covering a wide range of time periods. We invite contributions that analyze this phenomenon from various angles of economic, political, and social factors behind the divide, including but not limited to regional or national policies and their impact, industrialization and deindustrialization and their consequences, human capital and education, innovation, the labour market, and migration.

The workshop is supported by ARISE and ASE.

Deadline: July 15, 2024

Submission instruction: send an abstract of ca. 300 words to tancredi.buscemi2@unisi.it

Local Organizers

Michele Battisti (UPalermo), and Roberto Rossi (UPalermo)

Scientific Committee

Michele Battisti (UPalermo), Tancredi Buscemi (USiena), Emanuele Felice (IULM), and Roberto Rossi (UPalermo)