Historical Legacy and Policy Effectiveness: the Long-Term Influence of pre-Unification Borders in Italy

Guido de Blasio and Giovanna d'Adda

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: This paper investigates the interplay between cultural traditions and policy effectiveness. It explores the differential impact of a large development program (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno), implemented for four decades, starting in the 1950s, to stimulate convergence between Italy's South and the more developed North, on municipalities with different histories. Namely, we consider a sample of municipalities located on either side of the historical border of the Kingdom of Sicily, whose legacy is considered, from Putnam (1993) onwards, to be a prime-facie cause of Southern Italy's underdevelopment. Having been part of the Kingdom of Sicily is associated with a negative impact of development policies, but only when the allocation of development funds through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno suffered from low quality of governance and was driven by political considerations rather than by efficiency ones.

Keywords: Economic development; History; Social capital; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N4 O2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa14/e140826aFinal00815.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: HISTORICAL LEGACY AND POLICY EFFECTIVENESS: THE LONG-TERM INFLUENCE OF PREUNIFICATION BORDERS IN ITALY (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p815

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gunther Maier ().