Abstract

The South of Italy experiences a serious gap in terms of human capital. The lessening of quantitative gaps is associated to persisting and significant qualitative gaps. Such gaps are just in part connected with a gap in investments. This indeed is noticeable for expenses in capital account - whose liability is taken on by local governments, which in the South have less funds and generally hardly care about school system needs - whereas the allocation of staff and their respective expenses, charged to central government, are almost equally distributed. Gaps are linked and are part of the overall bad working of the Italian school system. For these reason it appears helpful the general framework of the Action Plan for improving South's collective services, which connects the use of additional funds to an overall reviewing of the way the school system works in Italy and in the South of Italy. A sharper action of system reform, to be coherently defined at national level, would be desirable for may reasons.