Southern Italy is growing faster than the Italian average. It is encouraging to read in the business news that it is ‘driving’ the national economy for the fourth year running. Taking a closer look at the figures (ISTAT estimates for 2025), it can be seen that Italy’s GDP increased by just 0.5 per cent, while that of the south increased by 0.6 per cent (although the Bank of Italy’s Annual Report states that this growth slowed in the second half of the year). And yet, Confindustria points out, the economy ‘remains at a standstill’, whilst entire industrial sectors are facing serious crises. The latest to make the headlines is the ‘white goods’ sector, i.e. household appliances.

Delving deeper and looking beyond short-term economic trends reveals that one of the social ‘wounds’ remains unhealed, a wound which is particularly undermining the already fragile growth trends in the South.  This is the demographic issue, namely the brain drain of young people to the northern regions and abroad.  The Great Exodus: 313,000 fewer young people in the South since 2019′ (Il Sole 24 Ore, 22 June).  Company executives are also leaving:  ‘One in four managers leaves the south to work for companies in the centre and north’. How can we envisage a future of development without a workforce?

Put simply, the structural gaps between the North and South remain wide in terms of overall GDP, per capita income, employment, productivity, and the quality of services,  and therefore in terms of prospects for younger generations.
In short, we must recognise efforts towards growth, entrepreneurs’ commitment to investing and innovating, and a hard-working and skilled workforce’s dedication. However, we must never forget that the North-South divide is one of the factors that has held back the country’s overall development and made recovery difficult ever since the unification of Italy.

A closer look at the ISTAT data clearly shows that growth depends on a number of factors, starting with investment financed by NRRP funds.  Public spending, which currently accounts for as much as two-thirds of growth in the south, will cease from 2026 (Corriere della Sera, 27 June). Tax incentives and the streamlining of red tape under the Single Special Economic Zone (comprising Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia, Marche and Umbria,  a very large part of the South) are also having a positive impact, encouraging entrepreneurs to invest.

Luca Bianchi, director of Svimez, comments, ‘The good news is that the South has risen to the challenge of the NRRP, in terms of both spending capacity and project implementation. However, it remains to be seen whether the NRRP has brought about structural change in the country’s growth, particularly in the South, or whether we risk taking a step backwards once the funds have run out.’ There is no shortage of doubts.

But, anyone familiar with Southern Italy and its entrepreneurs cannot fail to notice a certain positive dynamism, quite apart from the effects of public spending. In many companies, generational change has driven innovation and improved the quality of products and services. It has also fostered a willingness to enter new markets, including overseas ones. However, the entrepreneurial landscape is still rather patchy:  there are individual initiatives, some of which are highly promising, in certain areas, while most others remain stagnant and underdeveloped.

Investments in the industrial sector stand out in Campania, Puglia and eastern Sicily, particularly in metalworking and cutting-edge sectors such as avionics,  pharmaceuticals and  agri-food (including wine production) and  services.  ‘If investments are made, the business landscape responds,’ says Bianchi.

Speaking at the association’s centenary assembly, Maria Cristina Busi Ferruzzi, president of Confindustria Catania, highlighted the region’s leadership in patents and Catania’s contribution of 23 per cent to Sicily’s GDP (Il Sole 24 Ore, 23 June). ‘The Milan of the South’ is what the city liked to call itself until the early 1980s, emphasising its entrepreneurial dynamism. Then the world of public procurement and the sector’s major companies fell into crisis.  Organised crime has had a negative impact on entrepreneurship, as in many other parts of the south.  And now, we are starting afresh by looking to industry, our relationship with the university  and the opportunities offered by the digital and knowledge economies.  The aim is a high-tech South that is deeply European and attuned to the geopolitical developments in a Mediterranean region in flux.

To discuss the development of the South in earnest, we can focus on two key concepts: the first is ‘knowledge’, and the second is ‘market’. Let’s forget bad old habits involving claims for reparation (“…the State, which from the Unification of Italy onwards has humiliated and marginalised the South, must give us…), Neo-Bourbon nostalgia, and welfarist lures (using the ‘citizenship income’ – the Italian welfare allowance dependant on income and citizenship – is merely the latest wrong turn). Let’s think, instead, about productively investing in infrastructure, starting from education (quality schools and universities) and digital networks. And supporting whatever is needed to promote enterprise, productivity and competitiveness, enabling our businesses to grow within new production and technology sectors while expressing their core characteristics of  being positive social agents of well-being and change.

In short, Southern Italy needs to be reimagined as an economic area that is deeply integrated into the European Union and as a dynamic force in the reshaping of the Mediterranean, a region that has become strategically important in the fields of geopolitics and geoeconomics.

The chances arising from the constantly evolving ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘digital economy’, with their implications related to the extraordinary applications of Artificial Intelligence in all industry, services and cultural sectors – leading to a drastic alteration in terms of time and space – are precisely those that can situate the South of Italy in a position where seizing economic, civic, environmental and social development opportunities, rather than ‘making up for delayed growth’, is now the priority.

This is a new context, both European and international, which requires a broader understanding than the narrow-minded perspectives of localism and clientelist provincialism. At the Confindustria Catania assembly, the two presidents of the Sicilian Region who have been most committed to ‘sound governance of regulations’ and driving private investment were mentioned: Piersanti Mattarella and Rino Nicolosi.

It’s a context that poses new challenges not only to Brussels and to Rome and Milan, the two Italian capitals where political power and innovative economy reside, but also to public administration bodies and social actors, starting with companies and without neglecting the more progressive and enterprising individuals hailing from the South of Italy.

Of course, a focal point not merely in geographical, but also in political and economic, terms. In a world where trade routes and power relationships are being redefined, under the thrust of the dramatic events we are experiencing, the push towards a veritable ‘paradigm shift’ in political relations and social and economic development is accelerating.

What we need, in fact, is a critical reinterpretation of the many ideas that, recently, have guided the course of globalisation and the digital economy, as well as a plan for a ‘selective re-globalisation’ that includes reshoring processes aimed at shortening industrial supply chains (length makes them fragile and not very efficient) by relocating them in the heart of industrial Europe, without yielding to the temptation of protectionist notions but rather renovating and relaunching the whole international exchange system under the banner of fair, well-regulated trade. This is precisely where Southern Italy can take on its new role.

(Photo Getty Images)