fewer women and late deliveries – Corriere.it

The manual of Central Intelligence Agency gives Italy a particular record: this year it becomes the sixth-last country in the world by birth rate ahead only of South Korea, Japan and the mini-states of Andorra, Monte Carlo and Sant Pierre and Miquelon. It is less obvious to understand what happened to this national community which in the post-war period, until the mid-1970s, produced the largest number of children in Western Europe almost every year. Today we are down to just over a third of the births achieved at the peak of the baby boom in 1964.. Why does a country enter so deeply into a demographic recession? Psychological, social, economic and customary explanations are always difficult to untangle. There is never just one. But not all of Italy is moving in unison and comparing what has happened in recent years in each province can give clues and a picture of possible answers.

Because, precisely, not all of Italy is the same in this winter of births. Since when the demographic recession that began in 2008Bolzano saw its fertility rate grow by 7% to 1.72 children per woman in 2021, while Prato saw it fall by 30% (1.1 children per woman) and Rome by 22% to 1.18 children per woman: so the capital is far below the already low average of the country.

What fuels these macroscopic differences? A recurring explanation concerns the weak assistance to families, in particular the too low supply of nursery places. Yet, although these are very important, from the data it would not seem that the availability in the various territories is strictly correlated to the trend in births. The province of Trento, for example, has almost double the number of nursery places for every hundred children within 36 months of age, compared to Bolzano, yet since 2008 it has seen its double-digit fertility rate drop. Today Trento is far below the neighboring province in terms of number of children per woman. Rimini has had the second sharpest drop in fertility in Italy since 2008 and is now traveling almost at South Korean levels – the lowest in the world – yet it has many more nursery places than the Italian average.

On the other hand, provinces such as Trapani, Cosenza, Syracuse or Ragusa have extremely poor early childhood facilities, but for them the fertility rate has practically not dropped since 2008. Trapani was below the national average then and above today. Also a more systematic crossing of data it does not indicate that in Italy a greater number of places in nursery schools is correlated with a greater propensity to procreate: it is probable that the role of informal help from grandparents is the factor that escapes the Istat data.

So what explains the collapse in the birth rate? By crossing the data, a trivial but powerful correlation emerges across all of them: the provinces in which births decrease more or are lower, from 2008 onwards, tend to be more those in which the female population has decreased more fertile. Here too there are exceptions. But the correlation is corroborated by a general crossing of data and by specific cases. On average in Italy from 2008 to 2019 (this is the most recent Istat data available) the number of women between the ages of 16 and 45 decreased by 14%, while the fertility rate decreased by 13%. Provinces such as Ascoli, Ancona, Pesaro and Urbino and again Rovigo, Asti, Alessandria or Valle d’Aosta all show both an above-average percentage drop in the number of women of childbearing age and in fertility.

Of course, other, more complex causes also seem to emerge. For example, Milan, Rome and Florence come only after Potenza for the average age of women at childbirth (33.3 years) and not by chance they all show drops in the fertility rate much higher than the national averages. Giving birth latefor social reasons perhaps linked to the labor market, does not allow you to have more children. But there is no doubt that Italy is paying the price for its first demographic winter in recent years, i.e. the collapse of 43% of births between 1970 and 1995: simply, there are fewer and fewer women, and also fewer and fewer men , able to procreate because fewer and fewer were born then. Cos in the future the country will also pay for the current drop in births. Not by chance the outgoing president of Istat, Gian Carlo Blangiardo, often repeats that not even the most effective policies would be able to bring births closer to the average of two children per woman which keeps the population unchanged. The pyramid is already too unbalanced, the few fertile women should have an unlikely number of children each. The measures for the birth rate are therefore necessary but insufficient, by themselves, to stabilize the demographic picture in the country. However, how to manage immigration depends on political preferences.