Pubblico e privato nello sviluppo del mezzogiorno: la vicenda tormentata delle Zone Economiche Speciali

More than 6 years have passed since the first decree establishing, in Italy, the Special Economic Zones (SEZs). A renewed and fruitful relationship between the public and private sectors was envisaged at the service of the economic rebirth of the South, with more efficient and faster administrative procedures, tax relief, renewed infrastructures and better connections with global markets. The experiment didn’t work. Mainly because of the tendency, in our country, not to offer investors a clear and lasting pact with the public system; because of the endemic changeability of the regulatory framework; because of the irresistible tendency to generate new entities, new procedures, in the public system, for the sole purpose of controlling and managing decision-making and financial processes. What is missing is a liberal culture, centred on the so-called laissez faire, an administration oriented towards doing, which thinks in terms of objectives and not in terms of procedures, a policy that assigns to the state only the tasks that belong to it, leaving the individual the possibility of organizing