Most countries/regions/cities are developed in a lopsided manner with one part having higher/better economic part than the other. In India, one often sees Southern part more developed than Northern (South India vs North India, South Mumbai vs North Mumbai. South Delhi vs North Delhi) and even West being more developed than East (Western India vs Eastern India). There are all kinds of possibilities here.
In Italy, North Italy is more developed than South Italy. Giovanni Federico, Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta investigate and find:
The origins and the historical evolution of the gap in economic performance and living standards between Italy’s north and south remains an unsettled issue in Italian economics and politics. Until recently, mainstream Italian economic historiography inferred the existence of a sizeable gap at the moment of the unification on the basis of anecdotal evidence that documented the backwardness of the south. In recent years, a number of popular historians, who style themselves as a ‘neo-borbonic’ cultural (and political) movement, have dissented vociferously. They claim that in 1861 there was no gap in either living standards, economic performance, or development potential. They argue that the historical roots of Italian economic dualism are to be found in the harsh ‘colonial’ policies designed and implemented by the ruling elites in the north to the detriment of the south.
The most recent economic history literature on the questione meridionale (“the southern question”) has moved away from sweeping generalisations based on shreds of quantitative and qualitative evidence toward a comprehensive and systematic quantitative appraisal of the dimensions of economic performance and living standards.
This effort has so far been unable to settle the issue, because there is insufficient data on output in the early decades of the unified Italy. According to Daniele and Malanima (2007, 2011), at the time of Italy’s unification, the level of GDP per capita was similar all over the country, and the north-south gap remained narrow for at least 20 years. In contrast, Felice (2014) estimated that the gap between the north-centre and the south of the country was already 18% in 1871, and thus probably also in 1861, and that it grew to about 26% by 1911. Evidence about other dimensions of living standards, such as life expectancies, literacy rates, and heights has supported this interpretation (Felice and Vasta 2015, Vecchi 2017)
The authors look at wage data and find the differences persisted before unification:
This column argues that using real wages in the 19th century, rather than output data, sheds new light on this debate. At unification, there was already a significant gap between real wages in the north and continental south, which widened as the north-west industrialised. The main driver of the growth of real wages in this period was human capital formation.
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….after the 1880s, there was an acceleration in the growth of real wages in the north-west, whereas in the other macro-regions similar growth of real wages took place only after 1900. We looked for causes by running a standard growth regression model of real wages between 1871 and 1911 (data constraints prevented us using more complex specifications). We considered the five most important drivers of economic change according to the literature: human capital (proxied by literacy rates), social capital, market potential, endowments of water resources, and transport infrastructure (as proxied by the railway extension). We found that the only consistently significant and positive variable was human capital. The estimated coefficient implies a massive effect of human capital on real wages. Moving from the province with lowest literacy rate, Caltanissetta in Sicily (8.3%) in 1871 to the province with the highest literacy rate, Turin (57.7%) would add 3.7 points to the growth rate of real wages. In this counterfactual scenario, real wages in Caltanissetta in 1911 would have been 3.4 times higher than their initial level.
The Italian economic history of real wages bears out, once more time, the key role played by human capital as a fundamental cause of long-run economic growth. Given the dismal record in public education of the South (85.6% of illiterates at unification according to Vecchi 2017), neo-borbonic nostalgia for an imaginary lost prosperity, and the narrative of stifled southern development potential, are clearly untenable.
Hmm…Always interesting to read such stuff..
Mostly Economics 
