Competitiveness and economic performance of Southern Italy's SMEs in the first half of the last decade

The system of industrial production in the South of Italy has to cope with problems connected with both the persisting economic gap with the other parts of the Country and with a competitive crisis which, at the beginning of the new millennium, has involved the Italian productive system as a whole. The analysis carried out on sample and regional data has allowed us to focus on the economic performance and the most important dynamics affecting small and medium-sized enterprises in the South of Italy over the first half of the last decade. We found a situation marked by a real economic stagnation, in which some weak signals of reaction come from a limited group of smaller enterprises, exploiting the advantages deriving from a more flexible use of labour and from new foreign channels of trade, where competitive pressure is in fact less high.