Policy Responses and Outcomes of the Covid-19 Crisis: The National Framework and the Regional Dimension

This chapter first provides an overview of the national context in which the Italian regions were embedded during the first two waves of the pandemic. It starts with an analysis of the immediate actions taken in the dramatic days of late February 2020 and then moves to an account of how the country coped with the full unfolding of the first wave. Next, it explores the period of attempted return to normalcy in the summer, followed by the even more intense second wave. Throughout these developments, the territorial dynamics between the central government and regions shaped the overall national responses to the crisis. The second part of the chapter focuses on specific developments in regional contexts during the same period. The analysis is divided into two sections: (1) a survey of the regions’ ‘policy outputs’, that is, the measures put in place by individual regional governments (in addition to the national ones) to limit the impact of the pandemic, and (2) a map of the ‘outcomes’, that is, an assessment of the wider socio-economic consequences of the pandemic in the various regions. This allows for the evaluation of potential disparities between the actions taken by regional governments and the actual impact of the crisis across the Italian territory.