The provincial logic that slows development

Logistics is a crucial and delicate sector. We have clearly experienced this over the past two years. The pandemic has made us addicted to online shopping and the immediate delivery of goods arriving home – thanks to massive logistics hubs – from far-flung places in the global economy. It is also a quantitatively significant sector in the economy of the Northwest, with more than 14,000 companies surveyed in Piedmont alone and with a percentage of employees over 6 percent. There is a technology that depends on large initial investments in so-called strategic logistic poles. Once installed, these poles – which take the form of interports, rail interchanges or rear ports – allow the sector to operate with relatively low marginal costs. In economics, these sectors are defined at increasing returns to scale and for them to really work, the initial investment must be well designed, especially from a geographical point of view. In recent months, major investments are being planned. The most important is the railway crossroads between the North-South European corridor that goes from Genoa to Rotterdam and the East-West corridor that goes from Lisbon to Kiev and also affects the Tav Turin Lyon. In any case, the exchange will have to be done and – if we think from a national and not a local point of view – it makes little difference whether it will be done in the East or West of Ticino. From the point of view of the regional presidents, it is right to fight for these large investments, but from the aggregate point of view, parochial battles remain. In the end it seems that the final solution could be to have not one but two exchanges in Milan and Novara, obviously risking that both are too small to be really crucial. The logistics sector in Italy really seems to be worn down by the logic of the bell tower. In fact, even at the rear port of Genoa, discussions between Ligurian and Piedmontese institutions end up, as in Genoa they would like all the investment to be made near the port. Unfortunately, this provincial logic – which only makes sense if applied to football – ignores the aggregate interest and ends up delaying crucial choices. The global economy, however, is moving faster and does not wait for the solutions of what appear, compared to the volumes of international trade, small condominium disputes.