The most up-to-date economic and economic-historical literature has highlighted the common paths and differentiations manifested in the processes of convergence or divergence of regional economies in the main Western European countries between the second half of the 20th century and more recent years.
Within this framework, the analysis of territorial disparities, public policies for reducing internal inequalities and for the development of Southern Italy is essential to understand the dynamics of contemporary Italy and the country's positioning in the European context, within the different phases of international economic cycles.
The objective of the PRIN 2022, The assessment of regional development policies in Italy through a new database (1950s-2000s) is to contribute to the reconstruction of quantitative series and to the analysis of the effectiveness of measures supporting the industrialization of Southern Italy, promoting a long-term reflection, considering the different phases between the Extraordinary Intervention of the 1950s and the "New Programming" of the late 1990s, up to the most recent cohesion policies.
The research is the result of interdisciplinary work involving comparison and participation, and is open to contributions from a variety of experiences and competencies. It has been structured around two complementary work areas.
I) the reconstruction and systematization of various quantitative sources based on five datasets, which are inserted into a single access portal;
II) the description, processing, and analysis of data to provide a long-term reinterpretation of regional disparities, of policies supporting the growth of industrial sectors in Southern Italy, analyzing their effectiveness in terms of socioeconomic impact and the role played by various institutional and economic agents.
The work has adopted a historical-economic methodology, with a quantitative characterization and an international comparative perspective.
The five proposed datasets are, in order:
1) The incentives of the extraordinary intervention for industrial investments (1959-1993), elaborated in particular by A. Lepore, S. Palermo and A. Ramazzotti
2) The incentives of the cohesion policy for businesses, elaborated in particular by C. Cantabene, A. De Iudicibus and A.L. Baraldi.
3) The IMI Fund for Applied Research, 1969-2001, elaborated in particular by C. Brambilla and F. Lavista.
4) The Svimez statistics 1861-2011, elaborated based on the research, reconnaissance, and data publication activities carried out by Svimez on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy.
5) Employment in Manufacturing Industry in Italy (1937–2021), elaborated in particular by V. Daniele, R. Ghezzi and F. Samà.
In order to promote the wider dissemination of data and comparison within the scientific community, each dataset allows for data download, along with appropriate methodological notes. Furthermore, navigation within the portal is possible through a search mask that allows for a reconstruction of interventions on a territorial and sectoral scale considering the need to preserve, enhance, and harmonize the differences in the structure of the sources underlying the individual datasets.
The initial research results, data description, evaluation of historical series, and the impact of policies supporting industry in Southern Italy are available in the open access volume, Regional Disparities, Development Policies, and Economic Impacts in Southern Italy: A New Long-Term Perspective (1950-2024) (Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 2025).
N.B.: The use of data is freely available to scholars, subject to the need to cite the research and elaboration work of the PRIN, as indicated in the pages of the individual datasets.