This article deal with the dualistic nature of the Italy System and its evolution from the 1950s to the present day, arguing that it went through a prolonged stage as essential leverage for the economy as a whole to achieve rapid development, and that as from the mid-1970s it progressively...

In this paper I examine the Italian regional policies launched in the second half of the 1990s. In evaluating the discrepancy between targets and results I argue that the failure of regional policies is a facet of the more general failure of Italian economic policies in the last fifteen years....

The generalised economic downturn in developed countries and the significant constraints on both their monetary and fiscal policies have prompted new infrastructure investments as a tool to promote economic growth. However, both the critical analysis of the existing academic literature and the...

This article analyzes the evolution of Cagliari’s local ICT system. Established at the end of the 1990s, the local system benefitted from three factors: highly skilled researchers; industrial application of research results; and a local firm eager to achieve first mover advantage. Recently,...

The North-South problem is far from settled, and it is high time to look into the reasons why this dualism shows such extraordinary persistence. No longer having devaluation to fall back on, years have been wasted in the unsuccessful attempt to exorcise the spectre of decline with rhetoric about...

Nature is an important resource which can enhance Italy’s territorial competitiveness. Nature reserves cover about ten per cent of the territory and are even more concentrated in Southern Italy. In order to draw upon such an asset effectively, an overall strategy should be applied to the...

Despite significant public resources devoted to EU structural policies, the available intermediate and ex-post evaluations of these interventions do not seem to offer proper assessment on “what works” and what doesn’t. This paper analy-ses one of the reasons behind this "evaluation...

The paper focuses on the relationship between multifunctionality in agriculture and rural development policies in the light of the ongoing debate in Europe on possible strategies to enhance the secondary functions of agriculture. More in details, it examines the widespread but ambiguous...