La strategia Europa 2020 e la marginalità del Mezzogiorno

Europe 2020 is the European Union's growth strategy for the coming decade. In a changing world, policy makers want the EU to become a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. These three mutually reinforcing priorities should help the European Union and the Member States deliver high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion. The main aim of this paper is to analyze whether those partially new guidelines in regional policies may be beneficial to reduce the Mezzogiorno socio-economic differentials. This question is important for Southern regions after a partial failure highlighted in the new regional policy (NRP) applied in Italy since the 1990s. Procedural utility is introduced in the paper. According to Frey procedural utility means that people not value actual outcomes, i.e. the what but also the conditions and processes that leads to these outcomes. Procedural utility means that people may have preferences about how instrumental outcomes are generated. Procedures require good institutions and their lack in the Italian Southern regions may annul any planned growth strategy giving us insights on some potential drawbacks of these new European regional policies.