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In the pandemic twelve you will pay a high economic price. More than that of the north-central regions. And this despite having remained, during the first dramatic wave, substantially safe from the point of view of health. Also the effect of this general blockade decided by the government, some whisper, inspired by the industrial sectors of the North that fear losing market share to companies in the South. The result is that the gap between North and South is bound to widen. More than it already is. Just read, once again, the data published yesterday by Svimez and focus not so much on what has happened and will happen in 2020, but on what will happen next year, 2021.
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Let’s take one of the many parameters cited in the report, family income. In the South in 2020 it will fall 3.2%, less than 4.4% in the Central North. But in 2021 the South will only recover the 3.2% it had lost, while families in the North will have a 6.4% rebound. It means that in little more than a year those living in a northern region will distance those living in the south by another 2% of income. And it is not that the citizens of the south and the north all started from the same line. Istat has certified that families residing in the Northwest have the highest level of income per inhabitant (more than 22 thousand and 300 euros), compared to 14 thousand euros in the South, which represent 60% of the income in the North with a differential , compared to the national average, of 26%. Families residing in the Northeast can have an average income of 21,000 and 900 euros and those in the Center of 19,000 and 900 euros. In short, Covid, with its lockdown, will widen this already abysmal gap. And the same is true if you look at another number: GDP, gross domestic product. More GDP means more economic growth, more employment and, ultimately, more welfare. Covid this year will have a devastating effect on growth. This is the way it is all over the world, if businesses are closed they do not produce, if families are relegated to their homes they do not spend, and the economy can only go backwards.
THE TSUNAMI
But, once again, the effects of the economic tsunami caused by the pandemic will have the collateral effect of increasing the distance between North and South. Svimez predicts that the South’s GDP will fall 8.2 percent this year; once again it is an apparently positive figure when compared to -9.6% in the Northern Regions. But it is an optical illusion meant to last only twelve months. By the end of 2021, the Center-North will have recovered 5.4 percent of its GDP, more than half of the unfortunate decline in 2020. The South only 2.3 percent. Once again, the north will recover almost two points of GDP more than the south. Consumption gaps will also widen. In the Central and Northern regions, on average, household spending will increase by 5%, recovering half of the loss in 2020. In the South, the recovery will be less than a third: 2.7% after the fall 9%. one hundred this year. Similar investment trend. The export vocation, as it already happened in the previous crisis, will save above all the northern companies, inserted in global value chains.
Still, according to Svimez, something else will happen. Some regions of the Center will have great difficulties to recover, in particular Umbria and Marche, which “will slide south”. And so, among Covid’s legacies, Italy runs the risk of facing a “Question of the Center”, adding to the now endemic “Question of the South.” For Svimez economists, therefore, there is only one way to start over: “Compact the national interest and reduce regional gaps.” The occasion will be the use of the Recovery Plan funds, the 209 billion with which Brussels will finance the Italian recovery. The government has promised to use at least 34% for the southern regions, as much as the Italian inhabitants living in the south. But if regional distances increase, even the proportion indicated by the government runs the risk of being insufficient. Because it should not be forgotten that for decades the State has not fulfilled its ordinary investment duty in the southern regions, leaving the gap that Covid is now likely to widen dramatically.
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