1. The Euro Area’s Achilles Heel: Reassessing Italy’s Long Decline in the Context of European Integration and Globalisation
- Author:
- Dario Guarascio, Philipp Heimberger, and Francesco Zezza
- Publication Date:
- 07-2023
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW)
- Abstract:
- This paper analyses how Italy’s decades-long decline turned the country into the euro area’s Achilles heel, the most vulnerable spot in the common currency. We use a structuralist framework to synthesise different (competing) supply-side and demand-side explanations, accounting for long-term processes and sectoral interdependencies. We argue that structural domestic factors that were already present in the decades after World War II (‘original sins’) – low-cost competition and labour fragmentation, many small firms linked to low innovation, and a deep territorial divide – interacted with the policy constraints brought about by globalisation and European integration to exacerbate Italy’s decline vis-à-vis its euro area peers.
- Topic:
- Globalization, European Union, Regional Integration, and Macroeconomics
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Italy