ROME: Italy Pertosa is bubbling with pride as he recounts how Mermec, his company in the Puglia region of southern Italy, recently won a €50m contract to supply the Japanese railways with a measurement technology system for their Shinkansen bullet trains.
“They went all around the world and in the end they found what they needed here,” Mr Pertosa, 56, says. “I’ve made it my mission to prove that the south can compete on a global scale.”
But despite Mr Pertosa’s best efforts, prospects for Italy’s southern regions, known as the mezzogiorno, have only darkened. The economic gap between the prosperous north and the impoverished south grew wider in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the bruising triple-dip recession that followed. Concerns are rising that the south could be cut out of the tepid recovery that is under way in the eurozone’s third-largest economy.
“The depletion of human, entrepreneurial, and financial resources . . . could transform a cyclical crisis into permanent underdevelopment,” says Riccardo Padovani, director of Svimez, an industry group that advocates for southern Italy.
Some of the data have been especially troubling. While Italy’s economic output as a whole contracted by 0.4 per cent in 2014, it fell by 1.3 per cent in the south. Before the crisis, in 2009, the gross domestic product per capita of residents of Italy’s southern regions was 56.2 per cent of that of Italians elsewhere. By 2014, that share had dropped to 53.7 per cent, its lowest level in 15 years, Svimez said. More than 60 per cent of southerners lived off less than €12,000 a year in 2014, against 28.5 per cent in the rest of Italy.
