REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING STRATEGY: DESIGNING A DYNAMIC INTEGRATED MODEL FRAMEWORK FOR THE SICILY REGION

Over the past decades, Sicily Region has experienced periods of stagnation, recession and sporadic slow economic growth, lagging always behind the national performance. As a consequence of globalization and deregulation, the relevance of regions in national economies has changed considerably in the last decades. Recognizing the importance of the Sicily region in the development process at national level, the purpose of the research is to further explore the dynamics governing the behaviour of the regional economic system. The goal is achieved by the use of simulation modelling: a model framework for the regional economic system is designed by integrating the System Dynamics (SD) methodology with the Input-Output (IO) approach. System dynamics allows pointing out the key factors of the regional economic system’s behavioural pattern, and IO approach integration allows reaching the required level of disaggregation for the analysis to be supportive for the policy design process. The framework is designed to support the regional government planning process, thus, in order to gain insights about the implementation of the framework, the planning process at regional level is analysed adopting a qualitative research approach. The contribute of the research is providing a dynamic model framework that can support government action seeking development goal. Furthermore, Sicily region case study confirms previous experiences stating the feasibility and the usefulness of integrating the static IO approach and the dynamic SD modelling method. Further improvements are required for better specifying the structural differences amongst industries in order to allow for deeper conclusions about the regional economic system behaviour, and also, an higher level of disaggregation of inter-industry interactions is needed in order to enhance the usability of the framework for policy design.