Efficiency And Productivity Growth Across The Italian Regions: The Regional Divide Revisited

In this paper we study the efficiency and total factor productivity growth of Italian regions by implementing a bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis method. This approach allows us to perform a sensitivity analysis of the efficiency scores at regional level, in which human capital is included besides traditional inputs. Higher levels of average years of schooling were important for efficiency and TFP growth in the Northern and Central regions. Conversely, the overall scarce human capital accumulation in Southern regions negatively affected their performances. However, both DEA and analysis of decomposition of productivity growth, conducted by means of Malmquist’s index, highlighted that also in Southern regions, in which the growth rate of human capital and TFP was remarkable, the contribution of the improvement in pure efficiency to economic growth was totally nonessential.