Local governments in southern Italy that colluded with organized crime deliberately avoided large EU-funded projects to stay below anti-mafia certification thresholds, according to new academic research.

The study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, analyzed 1.5 million EU-funded projects across five southern Italian regions—Calabria, Campania, Sicily, Apulia, and Basilicata—between 2007 and 2020, cross-referencing project data with judicial records identifying municipalities whose governments had been dissolved for collusion with criminal organizations under Italy’s anti-mafia legislation.

The report found that municipalities with mafia-infiltrated governments received up to 93 percent less direct EU funding than their non-corrupt counterparts. The researchers from the London School of Economics found no evidence that the shortfall reflected weaker administrative capacity or less competent politicians in affected municipalities. Instead, corrupt administrations made a deliberate strategic choice, steering clear of projects exceeding €150,000, the threshold at which Italian law requires anti-mafia certification. 

The conclusion: Italy’s anti-mafia procurement rules appear to have effectively barred organized-crime groups from exploiting high-profile public projects but criminal activity largely shifted to lower-value EU initiatives. Rather than stealing more, infiltrated administrations invest less, depriving communities of infrastructure, services, and development spending that Cohesion Policy was designed to deliver.

Municipalities under criminal influence received between 22 percent and 30 percent fewer projects above the €150,000 threshold than clean municipalities.

“This goes against the common belief that more mafia presence simply means more EU money being captured,” Marco Di Cataldo, one of the researchers, told Euractiv. The news agency first reported on the findings. 

The economic consequences were measurable, according to the study. Corrupt municipalities experienced significantly weaker local income growth during periods of criminal infiltration—findings that are consistent with existing research linking organized crime presence to broader economic stagnation.