Italy begins to see recovery signals but, as the director-general of Italy’s central bank said, “the damage from the crisis has been worse than other countries and that’s also why recovery is more difficult”.
The fact is that Italy failed to make it into the top 100 of the Eu Commission’s 2013 Regional Competitiveness Index.
Italy’s Southern regions even fared the worst. Sicily is in 235th place out of 262, Calabria is in 233rd place, immediately after Puglia and Basilicata is in 277th.
Only Lombardy hardly tries to resist as a “Blue Banana” that is being part of that area of wellness and business traditionally going from London to Milan passing through Netherlands and Baviera in Germany. A driving area that has radically changed in the last three years.
Lombardy, in fact, was one of the top 100 European regions until 2010 and now has slipped in the rankings to 128th place.
With Lombardy also the rest of the North, driving force of the country, has now lost the train of the most competitive economies, while the South is valued as the European regions less developed like Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe, Greece and the Balkans.
The European top five areas are (according to Joint Research Centre and Dg for regional and urban policy’s map produced valuing the Fmi Global Competitiveness Index 2013): Utrech in the Netherlands, the London area, the area comprising Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in Britain, Stockholm in Sweden and Surrey in Britain.
In Italy light improvements, even if not enough to be useful to compete with the Eu economical centers, were registered in Sardinia, Umbria, Friuli, Bolzano Province, Molise, Liguria, Valley of Aosta and in the other autonomous Province of Trento, that has climbed 31 positions.
Maybe, a help to contrast the country’s worst recession in the last decades would come from Europe.
Italy is set to be the second top beneficiary of the European Union Cohesion Fund, a financial instrument used to narrow the development disparities among regions and member states, in the 2014-2020 period, according to tables published by its Regional Policies unit.
Even if “in Italy there are the first signs of a slow economic recovery, or at least of an end to the plunge, visible through various indicators”, as Salvatore Rossi, the director-general of Bankitalia said, the likely 29.2 billion Euros Italy is slated to receive (the sum could vary according to the final decisions by the European Council and the Parliament) out of all 28 member nations for the next 7 years, will be a strategical and maybe unexpected help.
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