After the Three Italies develops a new political economy approach to the analysis of comparative regional development and the territorial division of labour and exemplifies it through an up-to-date account of Italian industrial change and regional economic performance.

• Responds to recent theoretical debates in economic geography, involving economists, geographers and planners.
• Builds the foundations for a new theoretical approach to regional economic development and the territorial division of labour.
• Draws on the results of a recent ESRC funded research project, as well as on a large range of official data sets.
• Provides an up-to-date picture of Italy's economic performance and of its recent development relative to other European countries and the rest of the world.
• Analyses Italy's internal differentiation and its persistent regional inequalities.
• Examines the regional impact of the recent evolution of the car, chemicals, steel and clothing industries.
• Leads to a new and more complex picture of Italian development.

About the Author
Michael Dunford is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Sussex. In 2000 he was elected member of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences (AcSS). In 1996-2002 he was Editor of Regional Studies. In 2003 he received the Royal Geographical Society Edward Heath Award for geographical research in Europe. He has held Visiting Professorships at the universities of Pavia, Toulouse, Paris I: Pantheon-Sorbonne, Campinas in Brazil, Oslo and Sciences-Po in Paris. His previous publications include Cities and Regions in the New Europe (1992) and Successful European Regions: Northern Ireland Learning from Others (1996).

Lidia Greco is Lecturer in the Sociology of Economics and Labour Processes at the University of Bari, Italy. She previously worked at Trinity College, Dublin, where she carried out two EU-funded research projects. As a consultant, Lidia has worked for the University of Durham and the Sussex European Institute, and more recently for the European Union. She is the author of Industrial Redundancies: A Comparative Analysis of the Chemical and Clothing Industries in the UK and Italy (2002) and co-author of Building the European Research Area: European Socio-Economic Research in Practice (forthcoming).

Reviews

"In their analytically original study, Dunford and Greco show that Italy today is divided predominantly into two regions (north and south) and that the development path of each region must necessarily be understood in relation to that of the other. These findings have major significance for political-economic geography well beyond the Italian case."
--John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

"A welcome and detailed dissection of the changing geography of economic growth and decline in Italy, that demonstrates the importance and theoretical value of understanding the dynamic micro-foundations of regional economic change."
--Professor Peter Sunley, School of Geography, University of Southampton

"The book is, in sum a good example of theoretically informed empirical research in economic geography, which is aware of and inspired by but also not unconditionally adhering to the dominant theories and approaches in the discipline ... The book by Dunford & Greco is one of these attempts aiming to bring together empirical analysis of regional economies and the social critique of global capitalism. The authors have accomplished this difficult task in a brilliant way and for this reason their book is ultimately recommended reading not only to those interested in issues of regional development in Southern Europe but more generally to all practitioners of economic geography and related disciplines."
--Royal Dutch Geographical Society

Book Information
ISBN 9781405125215
Author Michael Dunford
Format Paperback
Page Count 376
Imprint Wiley-Blackwell
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 631g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 150mm * 23mm