Economy of the South always with the handbrake on:
this is confirmed by a research by the Confcommercio Research Office, according to which in the last twenty-five years the share of GDP produced by the South on the national total has decreased, passing from over 24% in 1995 to 22% in 2019, with a level of employment that showed cumulative growth equal to just a quarter of the national average (4.1% against 16.4%).
This latter phenomenon is mainly affected by the effects of the reduction in the resident population, in particular the youth population, which in the South fell by over 1.5 million in the period considered.
According to the Confcommercio Research Department, the main causes of this disparity are "structural defects such as bureaucracy, crime and infrastructural deficiencies".
If these defects "were reduced in such a way as to bring their endowments to the levels observed in the best Italian regions, the southern gross product would grow by more than 20% at the end of the period, with the 'creation' of about 90 billion euros, compared to one scenario in the absence of interventions, "says the research.
But in the meantime the differences have increased, at least since the global financial crisis of 2008: the ratio of real per capita output of a Southern inhabitant to that of a North-West inhabitant drops from 0.55 (55%) to 0. , 52.
In short, just over half, with a tendency to get worse.
In terms of population, the weight of the South on the Italian total goes from 36.4% to 33.9% but the issue of the youth population is much more serious: between 1995 and 2019 Italy as a whole loses over one million young people (from just over 11 million to just over 10 million) and all this loss is due to southern young people, who decrease by a million and a half.