Italian Regions Facing a New Crisis: Some Opening Remarks

The paper looks at regional economic structure and performance of Italian regions and reviews some recent contributions focussed on the Italian “Mezzogiorno” with a specific focus on the effect of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Pandemics (Covid-19) crisis. A comparison between Italy and the rest of the EU indicates a structural difference between the underperforming Italian econ- omy and the rest of the Union due to the specific structure of the Italian economy in terms of sector and firm size and the consequences on strategic and organizational issues of weak small businesses and inefficient medium and large enterprises. Moreover, the subordinate positioning of Italian firms in global value chains has been also identified as one of the reasons behind their poor performance in terms of productivity. Since “space matters”, when designing policies, decision makers should consider the role that agglomeration process and the improvement of quality of supra-regional infrastructures may play in the development of more advances regions, while allowing some trick- ling-down towards low-performing regions.