“We have a great historic opportunity to respond to the gaps, to which this country has not been responding for 160 years since the unification of Italy. They are gender, generational, territorial and skill gaps », said the president of Confindustria, Carlo Bonomi, taking part in a conference in Potenza on the theme« Motor Mezzogiorno, Restartenza Italia ». “This – he added – is the great challenge we face: if we fail it will be a great failure for the whole country”.
Basilicata objective
“We are living in a time of exceptionality”, said the president of Confindustria Basilicata, Francesco Somma – Today we also have the exceptional opportunity to build a greener, more innovative and more cohesive country “. But to succeed, for Somma, it is necessary to start from the deficits, the gaps, the limits. “The recovery that is underway – said Somma – is driven by the North while the delays in the South remain evident and weigh on”.
Sum: soon support to the car
Somma first emphasized the difficult challenge facing the automotive sector. «An important sector for Basilicata – he said – with 7 thousand jobs in the related industries alone. The stakes are high. Social safety nets, training, cutting the tax wedge are needed to govern the transition ». Somma also referred to the conversion of the oil & gas sector asking for faster procedures to modernize the plants. And authorizations for new alternative energy production plants.
Infrastructure a priority
Infrastructure is always a hot topic in Basilicata. «We need a change of pace on the safety of the territory – added the president of the Lucanian industrialists – and the region remains isolated. Even today, these external diseconomies constitute a ballast capable of nullifying any effort in terms of socio-economic rebalancing and recovery of the competitiveness of businesses and territories. Basilicata needs to recover efficiency in road connections, in a way that is functional to connectivity with the TEN-T network and the logistic systems it serves. Among the many works in this sense necessary above all, for strategic importance and usefulness, there is the “Salerno-Potenza Bari” road corridor. It is, in fact, a road infrastructure of enormous interest for the South to connect transversally the Campania, Lucanian and Apulian territories ».
Carfagna: “No longer a southern periphery of Europe”
“No longer a South to be compensated through bonuses and subsidies, but a South at the forefront of the Mediterranean and protagonist of global challenges”, this is the vision that inspires the government in office, said the Minister for the South, Mara Carfagna, speaking on video connection. «We have allocated 40% of the resources of the PNNR to the South – he specified – now the challenge is to spend these resources, spend them well and do it on schedule for the next five years. There is therefore a need for the assumption of responsibility by all the ruling classes ”.