La convergenza mancata. Radici storiche, governance europea e polarizzazione territoriale

Abstract: This article investigates the historical roots of persistent territorial divergence in integrated Europe, adopting a comparative economic history approach. Through a long-term reconstruction, it shows that institutions, human capital, and productive specializations have generated cumulative trajectories, path dependence, and lock-in phenomena, resulting in club convergence configurations, where only some regions bridge the gaps while others remain trapped in stagnation. The process of European economic and monetary integration, lacking a complete fiscal and political union, has crystallized macro-institutional constraints that have favored the most competitive regional systems, accentuating the polarization between metropolitan areas and peripheries. The most recent evidence shows that instruments such as Next Generation EU and the European Green Deal affect these gaps only when integrated into place-based smart specialization strategies, supported by investments in human capital, strengthened administrative capacity, and progress toward a common fiscal architecture. In the absence of such conditions, they risk consolidating localized rents and reinforcing the dynamics of club convergence, thus perpetuating a multi-speed European geography of development.