ABSTRACT:The article presents and discusses estimates of social and economic indicators for Italy's regions in benchmark years roughly from Unification to the present day: life expectancy, education, GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, and the new Human Development Index (HDI). A broad interpretative hypothesis, based on the distinction between passive and active modernization, is proposed to account for the evolution of regional imbalances over the long-run. In the lack of active modernization, Southern Italy converged thanks to passive modernization, i.e., State intervention: however, this was more effective in life expectancy, less successful in education, expensive and as a whole ineffective in GDP. As a consequence, convergence in the HDI occurred from the late XIX century to the 1970s, but came to a sudden halt in the last decades of the XX century.Keywords: Italy, regional growth, human development, GDP, education, life expectancy JEL Classification: N30, N33, N34, N90, O15 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: we would like to thank Giovanni Federico, Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Giovanni Vecchi, for precious comments and for sharing unpublished data with us; we are also grateful to Alessandro Nuvolari and Pierangelo Toninelli for their advice. Emanuele

This article presents value added estimates for the Italian regions, in benchmark years 1891–1951, which are linked to those from official figures available from 1971 on, in order to offer a long‐term picture of Italy's regional development. Regional activity rates and productivity are also discussed and compared. Some basic questions about Italy's economic history are briefly considered, including the origins and extent of the north–south divide, the role of migration and regional policy in shaping the pattern of regional inequality, and the positioning of Italy in the international debate on regional convergence, where it stands out because of the long‐run persistence of its disparities.

The recent availability of more accurate estimates of regional gdp, of social indicators (human capital, life expectancy, the human development index [hdi], heights, inequality, and social capital), and of other indices (such as market potential) has helped to advance the study of the growth patterns within Italian regions from (approximately) unification to the present day. This up-to-date information provides the basis for a new explanation of Italy’s industrial expansion and economic growth: The North–South socio-institutional divide that existed in Italy before unification in some respects grew stronger after unification, never to be bridged. This geographical division ultimately carried differences in human and social capital, governmental policies, and various institutions that exerted considerable influence on the regional structure of Italy’s economic growth.

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This article presents estimates of per capita gross domestic product, workforce, product per worker and activity rates for the Italian regions in benchmark years from 1891 and 1951; historical estimates are linked to the official figures available from 1971 onwards, in order to capture the evolution of the long-term regional economic disparities. In light of this picture, the main analyses concerning the take-off of the north-west, the rise of the central north-east regions, and the failure of southern Italy and of regional policies are briefly reviewed. A long-term, albeit still preliminary interpretative hypothesis is proposed, which is based on the distinction between key fixed resources (energy, human capital, social capital) and mobile resources (technical and financial capital). During the period of 'extraordinary intervention' in the south, the Italian state favoured the latter, not the former, thus achieving only transitory and unsatisfactory results.