The Economic Impact of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Autonomy. A Synthetic Control Analysis of Asymmetric Italian Federalism

Given that the existing literature on the relationship between fiscal federalism and economic development has given scant consideration to asymmetric federalism, this article illustrates a case study on the economic impact of autonomy of one of the five Italian special-statute regions, namely Friuli-Venezia Giulia (FVG). The study has been performed in the counterfactual framework of causal inference, applying the synthetic control method. For this purpose, a suitable synthetic FVG has been constructed to contrast 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. This comparison reveals that, if FVG were not an autonomous region, its per capita GDP would be significantly lower than that effectively observed.