What development for Messina? The Bank of Italy’s annual report on the Sicilian economy, just presented in Palermo, tells of an island that is growing more than the rest of the country, but which continues to carry the weight of a crisis that began at least seventeen years ago. According to the quarterly indicator of the regional economy (“Iter”), in 2024 the Sicilian product increased by 1.3 percent, i.e. more than the average of Southern Italy and Italy, but less intensely than the previous year.
This is a fact that, read in isolation, might seem encouraging. However, read from a historical perspective, it tells a different story. Despite the robust post-pandemic recovery, Sicily has not yet recovered the levels of activity prior to the 2008-09 crisis, while Italy as a whole has returned above that threshold already in 2022. In 2023, the last year with available territorial accounting data, regional added value was still more than four percentage points lower than in 2007.
According to the Bank of Italy’s analysis, what weighed most of all was not productivity – which offered a positive contribution, albeit lower than the national one – but demography; the population has in fact contracted by 4 percent and the share of people of working age has reduced by a further 1.7 percent, especially in the post-pandemic period. This is a structural node around which, ultimately, the entire Sicilian economy today revolves.
On the production front, the picture is chiaroscuro. Agriculture has suffered a severe drought, with the availability of water in irrigation reservoirs dropping by almost 40 percent compared to 2023: cereals, olives and especially grapes are declining, with wine production plummeting by almost 30 percent. The industry, on the contrary, held up: the majority of companies recorded turnover growth of over 70 percent and closed the year with a profit, also supported by the incentives of the Transition 4.0 plan
. Construction continued to expand, driven by public works. The tertiary sector held up thanks to tourism, given that attendance rose by 5.1 percent, driven by foreigners, with an increase concentrated above all in the provinces of Palermo, Messina and Trapani. On the foreign front, however, exports fell by 8.3 percent, more than in the rest of Southern Italy and Italy, crushed by the collapse of the oil sector (-15.2 percent), which accounts for almost three-fifths of regional exports. And here a front of concrete concern opens up for the coming months. Sicily’s direct exposure to the US market is in fact 7.6 percent of exports, with a significant weight for electrical appliances and agri-food, sectors that could fully suffer the effects of Washington’s duties.
The data offered by the labor market constitutes a favorable surprise. Employment grew by 4.6 percent, almost triple the national average, bringing the employment rate to 46.8 percent, still far from the Italian 62.2 percent. The unemployment rate fell to 13.0 percent, down almost three points, but remains double the national rate. Sicilian families, benefiting from lower inflation than elsewhere, saw their real income grow by 1.8 percent and consumption by 1.4 percent, both above the Italian average. These are numbers that tell of an island that, in the short term, is doing better than expected. But it is a run-up that starts from very backward positions and which the report itself invites us not to confuse with a rebalancing that has already occurred.
On the public finance front, the Bank of Italy reports that over four fifths of the Pnrr resources assigned to public implementing bodies have already been awarded, even if the works started or completed are still just under half of the tenders completed; the Pnrr is producing construction sites, but with a structural delay that separates the allocation of resources from their actual transformation into works. As of May 2025, 12.3 billion euros have been allocated to Sicily, 8.6 percent of the national total, i.e. a per capita share higher than the Italian average in relation to the population.
It is in this context that a fact is inserted that deserves attention for those who look at Messina and its territory. The budget law for 2024 reallocated 1.3 billion euros, originally intended for the Sicilian Region to partially cover the costs of the Strait Bridge, towards the state’s share of the Development and Cohesion Fund. The resources remain nominally tied to the same destination, but their shift from the regional to the state budget is a signal that is worth reading carefully, in a dossier that has been moving between announcements and postponements for decades.
Messina and its province, in the mosaic drawn by the report, emerge as a territory in fragile equilibrium, crossed by contrasting signals that rarely find space in national news. It is an area that is holding up better than one might think on some innovation fronts, because the 179 innovative start-ups, equal to 14.3 percent of the regional total, place the province in second place in Sicily after Catania and ahead of Palermo.
On the banking front, at the end of 2024 the deposits of families and businesses in Messina grew by 2 percent on an annual basis, reaching 10.3 billion euros, and securities held in custody at banks rose by 15.3 percent, a sign of private savings moving towards more profitable forms of investment; a dynamic common to the whole island, but which in Messina manifests itself with one of the largest financial assets of families in the region. Loans, however, continue to decline, albeit slightly (-0.9 percent), continuing a contraction that has lasted for years and which signals a still weak demand for credit from businesses and families.
As regards public works, the picture is less favourable, as the value of the works put out to tender in the province fell from 388 to 225 million euros between 2023 and 2024, a drop which is part of a generalized decline at a regional level, but which in Messina comes after years in which infrastructures (from the road network to hydrogeological instability) remain among the most sensitive issues in the area. Even on the environmental services front, the province pays a high price, linked above all to the cost of managing urban waste; in Messina, in fact, it is the second highest in Sicily (55.4 euro cents per kg, against a regional average of 47.1), with the figure for the capital municipality rising to 63.3 cents: a cost that weighs on municipal budgets and, ultimately, on families.
The profile that emerges from the report is that of a hinge city, geographically projected between the island and the continent, which however is not yet able to transform this position into a fully expressed economic advantage. Messina lives on positional income (tourism, the Strait, the University, a significant technological and patent vocation), but struggles to translate them into coherent public investments and into a growth in credit to businesses that accompanies the more dynamic growth of private savings. The Bridge node, with its endless history of announcements and with the negative omen indicated by the recent transfer of resources from the regional to the state budget, remains the most evident symbol of an expected infrastructure, which continues to be more discussed than built.
There is a paradox in these numbers that deserves to be highlighted. Messina accumulates private savings at one of the highest rates on the island, but is unable to transform this wealth into investments and development. In short, there is no shortage of capital, but it circulates elsewhere, or simply remains stationary, while strategic decisions involving the city and its territory (Bridge, public tenders, cohesion funds) are taken elsewhere.
This is a disconnect that appears to be the result of very specific public choices, according to which the economic resources generated by the local community are managed in places that are too far away due to geography and interests. In other words, a policy of territorial rebalancing of wealth is missing, with the result that the city’s very ability to look after itself and grow has been profoundly quelled.
This is obviously a suffering that can also be recorded in other territorial contexts, even very distant from ours. In some small English and American communities, forms of territorial governance of economic choices linked to specific-purpose capital funds or public micro-credit mechanisms are being tested to ensure the spark of the entrepreneurial engine.
Applied to Messina and its territory, this perspective of public intervention in a non-electoralistic key, but of private development, would allow the registered savings base to be able to conceive forms of investment that are not purely financial. On the other hand, the 179 start-ups surveyed are the symptom of an entrepreneurial vitality that appears poorly fueled both by the credit market and by the use of private resources.
The real question, for the next few years, is not whether Messina and its territory can grow, but whether they will be able to do so before their demographics, like that of the entire island, make that task increasingly difficult.
* Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Messina