If Greece will default on its public debt in the next weeks, and the Italian government will ask its Southern states to contribute with more cuts and new taxes to the attempt to cover the gargantuan €65 billion Euros black hole that default may potentially leave on its public accounts, this will be a textbook case of stealing from the poor after giving to the rich:
Note: to compile the diagram above I had to combine the Eurostat "Regional gross domestic product by NUTS 2 regions", a series ending in 2011, with the more recent Istat "Prodotto interno lordo lato produzione", which was published after the introduction of ESA 2010. This involved some fancy transformation including applying the Eurostat purchasing power parities indices on the last couple of years myself. Chances there are that when in a couple of years Eurostat will provide us with an ESA 2010 updated "Regional gross domestic product by NUTS 2 regions" series, I'll have to review the diagram above, but we should not expect its core message to change.
P.S.: the title of the diagram and of the article is a simplification: Sardinia, like Abruzzi or Molise, was never considered part of Magna Graecia, but I did add one and left out the other two. Also, I didn't forget Basilicata, which instead was quite central to the concept of Magna Graecia, but the diagram was already pretty complex, so I decided to leave it out. Basilicata would have fared somewhere half way between Sardinia and Sicily.
