Currently, the main form of public intervention in the Mezzogiorno are the financial subsidies and the so-called negotiated planning instruments. In this paper, we argue that both these kind of policies show a number of relevant drawbacks. Financial subsidies fail to stimulate additional...

The recent volume Produttività e cambiamento nell’industria italiana (Productivity and Change in Italian Industry) edited by Laura Rondi and Francesco Silva supplies an interesting overview of the structural change in Italian industry in the last decade. The aim of this comment is to survey...

This paper offers some brief comments on the papers «Quali politiche per il Sud? Il ruolo delle politiche nazionali e regionali nell’ultimo decennio», by Cannari et al. (2009), and «Bilancio pubblico e flussi interregionali», by Staderini and Vadalà (2009). The main topics discussed are,...

Scholars and economic observers suggest, almost unanimously, that inter-firm networks may possibly be a way to overcome the obstacles to the competitiveness of Italian industry represented by the small size of the firms. This paper points out that the same mechanism (i.e. the network) that...