A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Boschma, Ron Conference Paper The industrial rise of the Third Italy: Open windows of locational opportunity? 38th Congress of the European Regional Science Association: "Europe Quo Vadis? - Regional Questions at the Turn of the Century", 28 August - 1 September 1998, Vienna, Austria Provided in Cooperation with: European Regional Science Association (ERSA) Suggested Citation: Boschma, Ron (1998) : The industrial rise of the Third Italy: Open windows of locational opportunity?, 38th Congress of the European Regional Science Association: "Europe Quo Vadis? - Regional Questions at the Turn of the Century", 28 August - 1 September 1998, Vienna, Austria, European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Louvain-la-Neuve This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/113416 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu The industrial rise of the Third Italy: open window of locational opportunity? paper to be presented at the 38th Congress of the European Regional Science Association 28 august - 1 september 1998, Vienna Ron A. Boschma University of Twente Faculty of Public Administration and Public Policy P.O. Box 217 7500 AE Enschede The Netherlands phone: +31-53-489 4554 or 489 3260 e-mail: [email protected] Abstract The article aims to test a theoretical concept (the Window of Locational Opportunity concept) which provides a particular perspective with respect to the key problem in economic geography of how to explain the ability of regions to generate or apply new technology. In short, this WLO-concept holds the view that windows of locational opportunity tend to open up in the event of new techno-industrial development: these are likely to provide opportunities of industrial development for both leading and backward regions. This is because the impact of space may be unpredictable and rather weak for several reasons: there is likely to be a poor match with the new requirements of new techno-industrial activities, their creative ability may safeguard their development in unfavourable places, while local conditions favourable to their development are likely to be of a generic nature. Following the principles behind this theoretical concept, we present a long-term spatial analysis of Italy, which aims to explain the industrial rise of the Third Italy region in the post- war period. It attempts to assess empirically the impact of spatial conditions (including culture) on the industrial rise of the so-called Third Italy region during its initial stage of development in the 1950s and 1960s. A regression technique has been used to determine which of many potential factors (for instance, culture, industrial specialization, low-cost, flexible labour) in the 1950s could be held responsible for the particular type of industrial development in the Third Italy area, which was based on dense networks of flexible, strongly related, small and medium- sized firms in craft-based industries (clothing, ceramics) in a number of specialized industrial districts. By doing so, we focus attention on the extent to which the industrial rise of the Third Italy region was a rather accidental event that could also have occurred in other regions such as the First Italy (the industrial heartland of the North) and the Second Italy (the backward South). The preliminary results at this stage of the analysis tend to point out that the cultural dimension makes the difference: this particular type of industrial development took place in the Third Italy region because of a local culture of entrepreneurship and cooperation which seems to be lacking to some degree in the other regions in Italy. Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. Third Italy: main characteristics 4 2.1 The industrial evolution of the Third Italy 4 2.2 The particular type of industrial development in the Third Italy 7 3. Third Italy: theoretical framework 12 3.1 Theoretical perspectives on the industrial rise of the Third Italy 12 3.2 The WLO-concept and Third Italy 14 4. Third Italy: creativity and chance?17 4.1 Factors of creativity 17 4.2 Culture 20 4.3 Industrial specialisation 23 4.4 Flexible, low-cost, experienced labour 25 4.5 Conclusion 28 5. Conclusion 28 6. Bibliography 30 The author greatly acknowledges the financial support he got from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) during his stay as a visiting researcher at the Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche of the University of Bologna (Italy) in 1995-1996. 2 1. Introduction By presenting a study on the industrial rise of the Third Italy in the post-war period, this paper aims to test a theoretical concept, that is the Window of Locational Opportunity-concept (abbreviation: WLO-concept) which accounts for dynamic and accidental dimensions of new industrial development in space. This WLO-concept has been developed to explain the long- term ability of region to generate or apply new technology (Boschma 1997; Boschma and Van der Knaap 1997). In short, it holds the view that windows of locational opportunity tend to open up in the event of new techno-industrial developments; these are likely to provide opportunities of industrial growth for both leading and backward regions. This is because the impact of space may be unpredictable and rather weak for several reasons: there is likely to be a poor match with the new requirements of new techno-industrial activities, their creative ability may safeguard their development in unfavourable places, while local conditions beneficial to their development, are likely to be of a generic nature. The main objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which the rise of the particular type of industrial development in the Third Italy (Bagnasco 1977) opened up a window of opportunity for all Italian regions to industrialise in the 1950s. In other words, this paper focuses attention on the problem whether the rise of the particular form of industrialisation in the Third Italy, characterised by dense networks of flexible, strongly related, mostly small and medium-sized firms in craft-based industries, could also have occurred in the First Italy (the industrial heartland of the Northwest) and the Second Italy (the backward South). Should the Third Italy area during its initial stage of development be considered an unique area in Italy where this particular type of industrial growth was destined to unfold? Or, does the industrial rise of the Third Italy in the post-war period reflect a period of “open window of locational opportunity” in the spatio-industrial history of Italy? In other words, this paper addresses important issues, such as how to put the industrial rise of the Third Italy into a nation-wide and spatio-historical perspective, which have, to some extent, been overlooked by the extensive literature on this subject. To address these questions, this paper is divided in three main parts. To start with, Section 2 presents empirical data with respect to the industrial evolution of the Third Italy during the post-war period (as compared to the other Italian regions) and the main features of the particular type of industrial development in that particular area. In Section 3, some theoretical perspectives on the industrial growth of the Third Italy are briefly discussed. These theoretical insights are then incorporated in the WLO-model which, as set out above, provides a 3 particular perspective on how to explain the industrial rise of the Third Italy. In Section 4, we examine empirically which of the conditions (culture, among them) in the early 1950s that have been mentioned by a large body of (mainly Italian) literature, could be held responsible for the fact that this particular form of industrialisation took place in the Third Italy area in particular, and not elsewhere in Italy. Finally, Section 5 makes some concluding remarks. 2. Third Italy: main characteristics We briefly describe the main characteristics of the Third Italy region (or North-East-Centre, or NEC), as compared to other Italian regions. In Section 2.1, we put the industrial rise of the Third Italy into a historical perspective. We not only discuss briefly the spatio-industrial history of Italy since Unification (1870), but also present empirical outcomes of the industrial growth rates by region in the post-war period. In Section 2.2 the main features of the particular type of industrial development in the Third Italy, that is, small-scale industrialisation, predominance of craft-based and engineering industries, and Marshallian industrial districts, have been empirically measured by region, in order to determine whether the Third Italy area (as compared to other regions) may indeed be regarded as a particular case in this respect. 2.1 The industrial evolution of the Third Italy. If we consider the level of economic development in the three main areas of Italy (North, Center, South) at the time of Italian Unification, we get a rather complicated picture.