THE beautiful but rubbish-strewn streets of Catania, Sicily’s second-biggest city, are a world away from swanky Trento, in the country’s richer north. About a quarter of Sicilians are “severely materially deprived”—meaning that they cannot afford things like a car, or to heat their home sufficiently—compared with just 5% in Trento. Italy is not unique. In many places, the divide within countries appears to be getting worse.
According to an analysis by The Economist, the gap between richer and poorer regions of euro-zone countries has increased since the financial crisis. Our measure of regional inequality looks at the average income per head of a country’s poorest region, expressed as a percentage of the income of that country’s richest part. The weighted average for 12 countries shows that regional inequality was declining in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-08, but has increased since then (see chart).
The poorest area in Slovakia, the euro zone’s most geographically unequal economy, now has an income per person of just 28% of the richest, a slight fall from before the…