Le antinomie dello sviluppo economico italiano

The most recent studies on the territorial divide between the North and South finally tend to view the Mezzogiorno as part of a European perspective and to place the problem of its socio-economic delays within the framework of global economic dynamics. The "new meridionalism" of the post-war period had already intended to distance itself from a dichotomous vision that had assigned an ineluctable agricultural destiny to the South, to promote economic policy recipes of an industrialist nature that would find their most mature expression within Svimez and the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno. The founders and leading exponents of these and other institutions, partly coming from the Nittian experience of the early 1900s and partly from the "brain trust" of the first IRI, would be the leaders of the industrialization project of the Mezzogiorno in the post-war period, rising to become a modern ruling class capable of representing the peculiarities and socio-economic needs of the Mezzogiorno on a stage that was no longer local but national and international. Indeed, it was not only the financial and project contributions of national public entities, but also those of international institutions, such as the World Bank, that supported the industrialization of the Mezzogiorno and allowed a dual catching-up during the Golden Age years: the South with respect to the North, and Italy in relation to the most advanced economies in Europe. The role of the ruling classes, the weight and impact of internal and foreign funding, the involvement of international institutions, and the inclusion, even from a scientific point of view, of the extraordinary intervention for the Mezzogiorno within the international debate on depressed areas: these are the drivers of research in this volume, which has aimed to provide an original reconstruction of the season of extraordinary intervention, leveraging not only on reference literature but also on the retrieval and analysis of original archival sources.