Gli squilibri territoriali e la distribuzione territoriale degli investimenti pubblici

The well-known connection between investment, growth and development requires that a political strategy that aims to overcome ter- ritorial gaps must be based on a redistribution of public resources for investments that favor the least favored regions in an adequately effective and compensatory manner. The aim of this work is to evaluate the consequentiality of political choices in Italy over the twenty years with respect to the objective of territorial rebalancing. After introducing the topic and recalling the hypotheses of territorial convergence / divergence (sections 1 and 2), this article presents the recent empirical evidence on the territorial distribution of public expenditure in Italy (sec. 3), emphasizing in particular public investment expenditure (sec. 4), and highlights the distortion to which the “additional” resources for the South have been subjected, assuming the character of substitutes for ordinary resources (sec. 5). The effects of the investment on territorial development in the Regions are referred to in sec. 6, while sec. 7 summarizes the results of the work, concluding about the need for a serious scrutiny of the quality of public investment, especially as far as the use of the European resources available in response to the pandemic is concerned.