Professor Edgar Morgenroth:

There are hundreds – maybe thousands – of pieces of research that have looked at regional development. I have been involved in some of this, including in the context of EU structural funds, looking at regions throughout the European Union. The evidence simply is that growth in weaker regions takes a long time. A decade is almost like a heartbeat in regional development terms. The structural issues that lead regions to be poorer tend to take a long time to overcome, if you overcome them at all. Looking at southern Italy, for example, there have been 100 years of regional subvention and policy and nothing has happened; they have not converged. The evidence is that this will not happen overnight and we really are talking about decades.