Paolo Rizzi

Vulnerability and resilience in the local systems: The case of Italian provinces.

The aim of this work is to verify a theoretical representation of the multidimensional concept of territorial risk, through a study of Italian provinces. The concept is referred to the exposure of the territorial system to the risk of an exogenous event, as a combination of factors of fragility and resilience. In the proposed framework, elements of the organization of a territorial system had been identified, in its economic, social and environmental dimensions, mostly affecting his exposure to the adverse impact generated by a disturbing event and the ability to answer and to regenerate. According to this scheme of representation, the territorial risk is the result of the combination of these factors that influence the probability of a local system to undergo negative changes as a result of the occurrence of the event. The evaluation of vulnerability and resilience of a system, by adopting a holistic reading of the phenomenon, involves the identification of systemic components and attributes such as openness to the external environment, structural diversification, availability of resources, structural dependence/independence, functional redundancy, adaptability strategy. In the paper the authors propose the construction of an indicator system and composite indices for monitoring, through multivariate statistical techniques, the factors of fragility and ability to recovery. The proposed system is applied to a study of the economic, social and environmental vulnerability and resilience of the Italian provinces.

THE EVALUATION OF THE NEGOTIATED PLANNING IN ITALY: A COUNTERFACTUAL ANALYSIS

This paper aims to examine the effects of the Negotiated Planning in Italy in the last decade, withparticular attention to the impact of funding related to the Territorial Pacts on beneficiary firms. The literatureis divided into different analyses on the effects of the «new Italian economic planning». The firstand more drastic argument is attributable to the idea of the failure of Negotiated Planning, coordinatedsince 1999 by the Department for Development Policies of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Rossi,3382005; De Blasio - Lotti, 2008; Accetturo - De Blasio, 2011). In response to specific additional investmentflows addressed to the South of a significant amount, distances North-South were not reduced and especiallythe enormous effort of the new season of the decentralized territorial policies showed radical methodologicallimitations and results, with negligible effects on economic development and on employmentof the involved areas. The second theory emphasizes instead the presence of «positive signs» in economicdynamics of the South in the last decade, while recognizing the need of some major revisions in contentand practices of development policies (Viesti, 2005). However in the economic empirical literature thereis a lacks of comprehensive assessment of the effects of Territorial Pacts concerning complete data ondisbursements to firms, investments, performance of funded firms. The paper aims to fill this gap. Themethodology used for the assessment is consolidated in literature of public policy evaluation, and in particularthe implemented instruments are the difference-in-differences analysis and the matching analysis.Two reasons for caution in interpreting the results has to be pointed out: first, that the assessment of theeffects of Territorial Pacts is much broader than the analysis of the performance of the beneficiaries andgenerally concerns the territorial development of eligible areas, the institutional learning and the capacityto cooperate, and secondly the impacts of incentives on firms also derive from anticipatory effects whenincentives accelerate investment processes already programmed.