Pnrr, on employment and GDP double boost to southern regions

Arriving at the final straight of implementation, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan seems not to fully deliver on the ambitious promises of the eve in terms of macroeconomic impact. This is denounced by the country's stunted growth, all the more so in the continuing difficulties of an international economy that gives no respite, and is confirmed by updated estimates by Ifel, Anci's Institute for Finance and Local Economy, for Il Sole 24 Ore. Calculations that also show, however, a confirmation, this time positive, of one of the initial hopes: the thrust of the investments made with the Next Generation Eu funds was decidedly more intense in the South, where it generated an increase in per capita GDP and employment double that of the North in comparison with a scenario in the absence of the Plan.

Ifel's analysis is based on a Var (vector autoregressive) model, which takes into account real GDP and real gross fixed capital formation, both in per capita terms, demographic trends and the role of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) including national co-financing.

In the cumulative dynamic between 2021 and 2026, the Institute attributes to the Pnrr an additional per capita growth of 2.2 percentage points, a value that, however, is the result of an average between the +1.5% recorded in the Centre-North and the +3.26% attributed to the South. This distance is mainly explained by investments in infrastructure. The 'construction' item is, in fact, the one that determines the greatest impact, with an increase in sectorial GDP of 3.15% nationally and even 4.51% in the South, which compares with a more modest 2.24% in the central-northern areas. In the other areas, the contributions to growth are more modest, ranging between +1.1% in agriculture and +1.76% in industry in the strict sense, and the territorial differences are also smaller.

Infrastructure's leading role is also repeated in the analysis of employment dynamics. In this case, too, construction (+2.11% in total employment compared to the scenario without the NRP) impresses the most decisive acceleration and records the greatest gap between the South (+2.88%) and the Centre-North (+1.60%). The result, also helped by a similar spread in industry, is an overall increase in employment of 2.18% in the South and only 1.22% in the Centre-North.

This geography of impacts stems from the intersection of multiple factors. First and foremost, there is the South clause, which in the Italia Plan regulation imposed that at least 40% (against a population of around 33% of the total) of the resources allocated to each investment be allocated to the south, and which appears to have been respected in the final balance. But intensifying the effect of this flood of resources was also a greater responsiveness of the southern employment pool, because when inactivity rates are higher, the effect of additional investment is inevitably more immediate.