Sustainable Development and Territorial Differences: an Italian Analysis of Economic Sustainability

Sustainable development has become a principle guiding governments in defining their policies and actions. Each government has to decide how global objectives ought to be incorporated into national planning processes, policies and strategies. In doing so, it is fundamental to consider not only national specificities, but also and above all sub-national ones. This is even more a necessity for Italy, a country historically characterized by strong specificity and regional differences, which are aptly epitomized bythe so-called North-South gap. In this article, the situation of the Italian Regions as the achievement of the SDGs will be analyzed to monitor and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. We will focus on the four goals belonging to the economic dimension of sustainable development. The research methodology consists in using synthetic techniques. In particular, we, first, synthesized an index for each goal considered, and then we constructed the measure of economic sustainability