I due fallimenti della storia economica: il periodo post-unitario

“Economic history” is at once the events of the past, and their subsequent reconstruction. Italy’s “traditional” North-South gap developed after Unification, as the South failed to match the industrial progress of the North; that regional failure seems tied to a broader, national development failure. In the half-century after the Second World War, massive policy interventions in favor of the Mezzogiorno failed to close the North-South gap; that failure seems tied to the economic historians’ failure to understand the forces that had constrained Italy’s economic growth in the halfcentury to the First World War.