The role of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno in water-resources development

From 1950, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno was the tool with which the Italian state attempted to redress the dual nature of the national economy, the same dichotomy that earlier administrative, political and economic measures had failed to resolve satisfactorily. The various studies aimed at evaluating the outcome of the Cassa’s activity have usually looked at the extent to which the differential between quantitatively measurable indicators of regional imbalance narrowed or failed to narrow during the period under consideration, mainly reaching the conclusion that the South-North gap was reduced only in terms of GDP per capita, and even there the reduction was insignificant. This paper has sought to contribute to an assessment of the Cassa’s activity adopting a different perspective, examining the results achieved in a particular sector of intervention, the development of water resources. With regard to aqueducts and drainage, the main conclusion is that a blunt appraisal of the Cassa’s extraordinary intervention is problematic due to the difficulty in distinguishing between the responsibilities of the different parties which intervened in the implementation and management of the works that were carried out. In any case, the Cassa’s theoretical and practical efforts towards more rational mechanisms of resource-allocation have to be re-evaluated, as the experiment which it triggered was reprised only at the beginning of the 1980s, when the application of cost-benefit analysis became a constant practice within the Italian public administration.