Istat, Italy in the grip: between the drop in the birth rate and the poverty trap

ROME – A country where we are born less and lesspeople are getting older but without receiving adequate assistance, the ranks of workers are getting thinner and we remain trapped in the starting family conditions: almost a third of adults at risk of poverty come from families which in turn were in bad financial condition.

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Yet the Istat report of this year does not want to give us a condition of inevitable decline of the country: in reality, to give a different turn to the demographic trend and its powerful impact on the economy, it would be enough to put those in a position to work 1.7 million NEETs (young people who do not study and do not work) which have been our negative record in Europe for years.

We need women and young people to work

It would be enough to put mothers in a position to work: the statistics speak for themselves, in the age group between 25 and 49, 80.7% of women who live alone work, 74.9% of those who live with a partner but have no children, only 58 .3% of those who have children. And of course in the South the data is even worse.

Work, and development, may be the only way to return to growth given that it will take years to reverse the trend in the birth rate: the 27,000 births less than in 2022 which brought us to the negative historical record, explains the Istat, are due for 80% to the decrease in women between 15 and 49 years of age and only for 20% to the drop in fertility. In short, fewer children are born, above all because fewer parents were born 30 years ago.

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And so the real challenge now is to enable prospective parents to bring more children into the world. A personal choice, of course. But in reality linked to objective conditions, starting with a job with an adequate salary. First of all a job: our employment rate remains at the rear in Europe, despite having finally exceeded 60%. However, this occurred mainly due to the effects of raising the retirement age rather than the increase in youth work. Compared to 2004, in 2022 in Italy employed people aged 15 and over grew by 784 thousand units, a trend which is the sum of an increase of 435 thousand employed in the 15-64 age group and 349 thousand over 65 upward.

In 2022, despite the improvements, the participation and employment rates of the population aged between 25 and 64 in Italy are around 9 percentage points lower than the European average and more than 14 points lower than in Germany. Achieving the current employment rates of the EU27, explains Istat, would allow us in 2041 to reduce by more than two thirds (from 3.6 to 1.1 million) the loss of employment that would occur at unchanged rates due to the reduction of births. If the gap were bridged (equal to 18 percentage points) in the 20-24 age group, a further 240,000 jobs would be recovered. In short, it would be enough to bring women and young people to work as in the rest of Europe to undo the effects of demographic decline.

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The wage problem

And there is also a problem of wages, and of stability, this also affects the possibility of having a family and bringing children into the world. In Italy, low productivity continues to push wages downwards: “to defend the competitive price advantage – states the Istat Report – it is a priority for businesses to maintain moderate wage growth”. In the last ten years in Italy “the nominal growth of average personnel costs has been lower than the nominal growth of productivity, both for all firms and for the manufacturing sector”. While in France, Spain and, above all, in Germany, nominal wages recorded a higher growth than that of productivity.