GEOGRAPHICAL INDICATIONS: A LOCAL OPPORTUNITY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL AREAS

The Geographical Indication (GI) scheme of the European Union (EU) provides a specific acknowledgement to agri-food products having a strong linkage with their region of origin. This generates benefits for producers and sellers, but also for the overall local development of the region of origin. In this article, we show the effects produced by Geographical Indication wines in terms of the population growth rate for rural municipalities in Italy. Additional evidence can be found in a recent Regional Studies article (Crescenzi et al., 2022) focusing on the causal impacts of GIs as a proxy for local informal institutions that are acknowledged and thereafter translated into a globally recognized formal regulation