Riccardo Cappellin (p)

Fabio Mazzola

The current slow growth of the European economy is due to (a) the decline in investment, (b) the absence of a medium-term strategy and (c) the inadequacy of existing legal instruments, which do not facilitate the cooperation between the various private and public actors .

The European economic recovery and the thrust in the future of a stronger European integration must start from a "new industrial and regional policy", centred on a major European program for innovative investment. This investment program should start from the territory and be focused on the network of the hundreds of European cities and regions of different sizes, where businesses operate and citizens live.

Investments should be promoted through a "new industrial and regional policy", which stimulates the creation of new knowledge, the thrust in the future, the willingness to undertake by the enterprises and which promotes the development of innovation and knowledge networks between the various actors in the various national, regional and local innovation systems.

A new European industrial and regional policy should be based on a botton-up collaboration between local, national and EU institutions. Is necessary to strengthen the intermediate institutions (such as: PPP and various no profit associations), adopt modern forms of multi-level governance between European and national and regional/local institutions, ensuring greater decentralization of policy decisions and strengthen the planning capacities of the public institutions and their capabilities in providing new, better quality and more efficient public services.

The proposals of the Discussion Group “Growth, Investments and Territory” are illustrated in the three e-books published in the website: http://economia.uniroma2.it/dmd/crescita-investimenti-e-territorio read by more than 17.000 people. The last book has been downloaded (until June 2017) by more than 1.300 readers.

Guido Pellegrini (p)

Riccardo Cappellin

See extended abstract

Fabio Mazzola (p)

Guido Pellegrini

The debate on industrial and regional policy is now moving from the analyses related to the sectoral and regional effects of the Great Crisis to the definition of intervention strategies able to restart the real growth process. Overall, the academic and institutional debate highlights a renewed interest in the analysis of territorial and structural gaps and for the identification of "places" where change can take place and from which the growth process can start again. This field of study and analysis can only be accompanied by a revival of industrial and regional policies. An approach which allows for multiple objectives in policy makings will, in the long term, provide far more fruitful results for the harmonious functioning of the economic and social systems.
In this framework , the theme of the revival of investments is of paramount relevance for institutions and policy makers committed to identify virtuous paths of responses to the long period of crisis that has characterized economic and social Western economic systems. The design of industrial and regional policies which may couple macroeconomic policies and their obvious limitations in pushing forward the growth process of Western economies is the main focus of this contribution.
In this context, the contribution will try to evaluate the potential for a new industrial policy for the Italian South and other lagging European regions by considering:
a) the change in the industrial and productive structure generated by the seven-year-period of crisis;
b) the potential for the development of new industries related, both directly and indirectly, to the current specialization of the region;
c) the possibility of making simultaneous use of cohesion, national and other European financial instruments in the same productive chain;
d) the condition for compatibility and sustainability of the above strategies with outside economic and institutional constraints.