Differenziali territoriali di produttività ed efficienza e sviluppo dualistico.

In the present work we argue that in order to appraise the explanatory power of the existing explanations of dualism in the Italian economy it is important to examine their empirical predictions relatively to the territorial dispersion of some efficiency measures. Applying the non-parametric FDH and DEA procedures to firm-level data taken from three surveys of Mediocredito Centrale, we calculate for the 1990s measures of technical, scale and allocative efficiency. The results point to significant territorial differentials, which penalise firms from the Mezzogiorno. These differentials are particularly strong for technical efficiency, while they are less strong and frequent for scale and allocative efficiency.