«How do you reverse the trend in the birth rate? More independent boys and female employment»- Corriere.it

Massimo Livi Bacci is the doyen of Italian demographers. He is to the point that for many years he was almost alone, underlining the importance of a dimension that the country has long neglected.

Are you happy that the birth rate issues are at the center of the government’s attention today?

“I think it’s good that we’re finally talking about it more. When I was a young scholar this discipline was not well liked, because it was identified with fascism».

Is this why politics has never governed the phenomenon, until the decline in births in recent years?

«Italy is not a white fly. South Korea is at the heart of the global economy, yet has fewer than one child per woman. Spain and Japan are not in very different situations from ours».

How is the decline reversed?

“There is no magic wand. Spending one thousand euros per child from the public budget would not necessarily be enough to change people’s psychology. Only a set of changes can sustain the birth rate. On one condition: that they gather enough support to last. France and the Scandinavian countries have been successful thanks to policies that have persisted for more than half a century».

«Three aspects in which we need to invest: autonomy of young people, who will have fewer and fewer children if they only become independent at 35 or 40; women’s work, because the countries with the highest birth rates are those with the highest employment of women; and gender equality, to ease the burden of child rearing still on women’s shoulders.

But given the decline in the population of childbearing age, even an increase in the average number of children per woman risks not being enough…

“We would only mitigate the decline. Also because the extra child born next year would enter the labor force in twenty years or more. The gains are far in time, for the economy.

So Italy has to choose between demographic decline or more immigration?

«In the very long term, a loss of a few million inhabitants is not a tragedy, provided that a balance is then reached. It is the alteration of the age structure that weighs, the excess of the elderly over the young. This is why I believe there is no alternative to consistent immigration: a positive balance, net of emigration, of the order of that of the first decade of this century. About 300,000 people a year.”

But is it politically sustainable?

“It’s happened before. And this is what Germany does, investing in successful integration».

Does Minister Francesco Lollobrigida interpret widespread fears when he says that “Italian ethnicity” must be protected?

«Italy is made up of ethnic groups, in the plural. There is one from Sardinia, one from Sicily, one from the Alps. There are Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. There are Italians who come from Albania, from Romania. There is not a single ethnic group in our country, there has never been».

But Giorgia Meloni speaks of a “nation” and not of a country. Are they synonyms?

«This is a minefield, because it takes us back to the exasperation of the principle of the self-determination of nations, which led to the cutting out of the geographical map of Europe according to ethnic borders after the Great War. The tragedy of the 20th century was the identification of the state and the nation with the ethnic group, because it led to the denial of the rights of minor ethnic groups. Today, of course, it is different, but this question must be resolved. Provided that, perhaps out of naivety, there is no real fear of “ethnic replacement”».

Isn’t the fear of becoming diluted in a changing world not human?

“We have to decide which country we want to be: closed in on itself like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or open like Germany. It’s a choice”.

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