 Persistent regional gaps and the role of social capital: hints from the Italian Mezzogiorno's caseWorking Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Abstract: In this article I maintain that until the mid Seventies the regions of the Italian Mezzogiorno have followed a well-known path of divergence and convergence – a pattern in common with many other similar cases. The main characteristic of the Mezzogiorno's case, however, is that the convergence phase has led the area to a remarkably unfavourable steady-state. Further, I suggest that the disappointing results obtained in the area by several and richly financed public policies – and the high persistence of the unfavourable steady-state – are partly due to the lowerquality institutions in the southern regions. In the second part of the article I discuss recent contributions that associate this failure of local institutions to the scarcity of social capital, and that explain the persistence of this scarcity assuming the existence of mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of values and norms that change very slowly in time. Finally, in the final part I discuss briefly the role of economic policy in the presence of mechanisms of this nature. Keywords: institutions and economic growth; social capital; convergence (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cns:cnscwp:200904 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Contact information at EDIRC. |
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