| 15/10/2023 | |
The number of young people in Italy has dropped by nearly a quarter in the past 20 years owing to the declining birth rate. Italy now has the fewest people aged 18-34 in proportion to its population of any country in the European Union. In a survey of the age group, the national statistics agency, Istat, discovered that numbers had dropped by three million, or 23 per cent, since 2002 to 10.2 million last year, threatening Italy’s ability to sustain its workforce. “We are already seeing the impact on the labour force, just when we need workers to pay the taxes to cover pensions as Italians live longer,” Alessandro Rosina, a demographer at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, said, Italy’s population dip is being watched closely by Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, who has ruled out the need for more migrants to replenish the workforce, instead announcing measures to increase the national birthrate, which dropped to a record 393,000 last year, helping push the population down by 179,000 to just under 59 million. The new figures from I stat, however, show that the drop in births has been going on for a generation, meaning it will be hard today to encourage Italians to keep up births when there are simply fewer Italians. “The low birth rate 20 years ago means there are fewer 20- year-olds around today,” Rosina said. “Until the mid-70s, Italy was above the European average for birth rates, then fell to among the lowest in the world by the end of the 1980s, and has not improved since,” he added. After hitting its peak number of people aged 18-34 — 152 million — in 1994, the age group slipped to being 17.5 per cent of the population in 2021 against an EU average of 19.6 percent. The fall in numbers since 2002 has been worst in the south of Italy, reaching 40 per cent in Sardinia. The Jstat report said that there were not only fewer Italians of childbearing age but, since they stayed at home longer and married later in a tight economy, they were themselves having fewer children. In the south, 71.5 per cent of the age group live with their parents, compared with an EU average of 49 per cent, In Calabria, the toe of Italy, 35.5 per cent are so-called Neets, neither employed nor in education or training. Southern Italian men now get married at an average age of 36, up from 32 in 2004. “This is a generation for which time risks standing still,” Istat said. Rosina said that in the 1990s Italy became the first country in the world where the over-65s outnumbered the under-15s. “Now they outnumber the under-25s and by 2050, the most common age for an Italian will be 75 — something we have never seen,” he said. istat reported that the rest of the EU was not far behind. The bloc had lost 16.6 million people aged 18-34 between 2001 and 2021, it said, shrinking the total from 104.3 million to 87.6 million. Rosina said: `European countries where couples have less than two children are following in Italy’s footsteps.”
