INSTITUTIONS, CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROSPERITY - Historical Economics and the “Meridione”

The study of the determinants of the socio-economic gap between the North and the South of Italy has a long intellectual tradition, starting from the work of Pasquale Villari, Francesco Fortunato, Francesco Saverio Nitti, Gaetano Salvemini, Antonio Gramsci, just to mention a few. Historical economics, by joining the forces of economic historians, political scientists, and economists, has been recently bringing to bear new data, methods, and models, to better understand the issue.