This year's Svimez Report on Southern Italy brought two pieces of news, one good and one bad. The good one concerns GDP, which has always been taken as the main indicator of the North-South gap: in 2024 for the second year in a row the South has higher increases than the Center-North. Based on this data, Prime Minister Meloni said that the South is, at last, the locomotive of the country's development. Unfortunately, however, Svimez itself predicts that this trend will be reversed in the coming years, so it cannot be imagined that the GDP gap will narrow. The other key reading of the Report, which is unfortunately more important because it is more structural, gives us a picture of a South condemned to desertification: a very strong demographic winter, a persistent exodus of tens of thousands of young people from the southern regions. Here is the real drama. And perhaps, among the proposals put forward by Svimez to prevent signs of growth from being discouraged by the lack of adequate policies (decontribution, certainty of public funding, targeted industrial policy interventions), priority should go to those related to the living conditions of citizens: schools, health, personal services, social housing. Without investing in these areas, the desertification of the South will be inevitable.