The economic impact of Italian special-statute regions

FBK-IRVAPP has launched a research project to evaluate the economic impact of Italian special-statute regions. The project has been performed by adopting the synthetic control method. Nevertheless, since that method prescribes to observe and then reproduce a quite long pre-intervention period (in this case- a pre-autonomy period), the study has concerned a single special-statute region, namely Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) whose statute was approved in 1963. The per-capita GDP has been employed as indicator of economic development. Hence, a synthetic control unit has been constructed by using as predictors of that outcome variable some indicators of sectoral economic structure, labor productivity, gross investment, and of human capital. Therefore, by contrasting the evolution of FVG’s real per capita GDP, observed over the post-autonomy period, with the corresponding evolution of the same aggregate for the synthetic counterpart, it results that, if FVG were not an autonomous region, its per-capita GDP would be significantly lower than that effectively observed.