Ten years on: has Italy's Inner Areas Strategy paid off?

This paper evaluates the impact of Italy's National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI), a place-based policy launched in 2014 to counteract demographic and economic decline in peripheral areas. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach on detailed municipal-level data, we find no evidence of population growth, consistent with the typically long timeframe required for demographic changes to manifest. In contrast, we observe a significant increase in local business density in treated municipalities, with no corresponding effects on employment and housing prices. Notably, municipalities with higher administrative capacity are more successful in attracting funding and exhibit stronger positive impacts, highlighting the critical role of governance quality in shaping policy outcomes. Geographical disparities emerge, with stronger economic effects observed in Central and Northern Italy.