For decades, we have been known that in Southern Italy the job offer is absorbed almost exclusively by the service sector. But the most important aspect - not yet explored by the official statistics - is that this sector is composed largely of organizations directly or indirectly financed by public resources. With the result that the majority of the southern population is paid by public administrations. How much do this anomaly of the job market impact on the ability and/or ways in which the southern governments drive the development process? Trying to answer this complex question, the author, after having given a definition of "public job market" that goes beyond the concept of the "wider public sector", traditionally understood, reconstructs with empirical researches the extent of the phenomenon using as a case study the satellite of the region Sicily as main core.
Keywords: Key words: local development, public job market, wider public sector