Le asimmetrie della crescita e le probabilità della stagnazione e dello sviluppo: alcune stime con dati settoriali e regionali.

This essay examines some asymmetries in the productivity catch up across industries and regions and in the role of investment to foster output dynamics. Results from OLS, probit and truncated regressions for predicting whether output per worker across local economic sectors in the Italian economy (1981-1994) stagnates or grows rapidly are presented and some recent productivity gains in the Southern area are noticed. Key words: economic growth, multiple regimes, threshold models, poverty traps.