South, the alarm Svimez: in recession in 2023. While in the Center-North the GDP will grow by 0.8%
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economy
NoonNovember 28, 2022 – 10:51 am
The Report has been presented: the average Italian figure is +0.5%. Almost 800,000 new poor
from Simon Brandolini
The perfect storm: Covid, war, energy crisis and inflation impacting families and businesses. In 2023 the gap between North and South will reopen. According to Svimez’s estimates the GDP of the South would contract up to -0.4%, while that of the Centre-North, while remaining positive at +0.8%, would mark a sharp slowdown compared to 2022. The Italian average figure should instead be around +0.5%. So a South in recession in a country in stagnation. This is the summary of the report of the association that the general manager Luca Bianchi is presenting to the Chamber of Deputies in the presence of ministers Raffaele Fitto and Nello Musumeci.
The slow recovery and then the shock
In 2022, Italy should continue to grow more than the EU-27 average (+3.8% against 3.3%), but the growth gap between the North (+4.0%) and the South (+2.9%) should reopen. The deceleration of consumption and investments for the machinery, equipment and means of transport component contribute to determining this result. In 2023, Italy’s GDP is expected to grow by 0.5%, a figure brought into positive territory by the Centre-North (+0.8%), while the South would enter a recession (-0.4%). In 2024, the pace of growth should accelerate nationwide (+1.5%), due to a more sustained restart in the Centre-North (+1.7%). The unfavorable growth differential in the South would be 0.8 percentage points.
760,000 new poor
Svimez estimates that due to the rise in energy and food prices, the incidence of families in absolute poverty could grow by about one percentage point, rising to 8.6%, with strong territorial heterogeneity: + 2.8 percentage points in the South, against 0.3 in the North and 0.4 in the Centre. In absolute values, an estimated 760,000 new poor people are caused by the inflationary shock (287,000 households), of which half a million in the South. The increase in electricity and gas prices weighs 42.9 billion euros on the annual bill for Italian industrial companies; about 20% (8.2 billion) falls on the industry of the South, whose contribution to the national industrial added value is however less than 10%.
Forecasts for 2024
2024 should be a year of recovery in the wake of the general improvement in the international economy, together with the continuation of the recovery from inflation which drops to +2.5% and +3.2% in the Centre-North and in the South during the year. It is estimated that GDP will increase by 1.5% at the national level in 2024, due to the effect of +1.7% in the Centre-North and +0.9% in the South.
Impact of Citizenship Income
Svimez has also evaluated the impact of Citizenship Income in limiting poverty, while confirming its poor ability to enter the world of work. Without these interventions, there would have been almost 2.5 million poor families, almost 450,000 more than the value recorded in 2020 (just over 2 million), which corresponds to over one million fewer people in conditions of absolute poverty, of which about two-thirds in the South. Among those who are employable in 2021, only about 43% have signed the Pact for Employment (50% in the North and 40% in the South) and less than half of these have received an offer. In the South, due to the lack of job offers and the inefficiencies of employment services, it can be estimated that out of a population of around half a million employables, around 1 in 5 has received a job offer.
The working poor
Another figure that is reaching tragic levels that of the “working poor”, i.e. those who, despite having a source of income, are at risk of poverty. This is due to the diffusion of precarious contracts. For instance in the South there is a very large use of involuntary part-time work (77.5% compared to 54.7% in the Centre-North). There are 877,000 families with a poor worker in Italy, of which about 280,000 in the South. In the case of blue-collar workers, the share of families in poverty rises to 13.6% in the South (it was 12.7 in 2020) and 13 .8% in the North.
Educational gaps
In Italy, the percentage of children aged between 3 and 5 who attend an educational facility (93.2%) is higher than the European average (89.6%). But the same services are not offered throughout the country. In the South, for example, extended hours are much less widespread (only offered to 4.8% of children); conversely, shorter hours are more common (20.1%) than in the Centre-North: 17.0% and 3.6% respectively for extended and short hours. While in primary school the percentage of pupils attending full-time is lower in the southern regions (18.6%) than in the rest of the country (48.5%). In the South, around 650,000 pupils in state primary schools (79% of the total) do not benefit from any canteen service.
Female employment rate
The female employment rate in the South is very far from the European average. In Italy the gap with Europe, of about 10 points at the beginning of the century, increased further, approaching 15 points in 2022. But in the South the difference is 30 percentage points. Carrying the comparison within the country, the gap between the female employment rates of the South and the Centre-North is clear, which in terms of number of employed people is quantified at 1.6 million (in the sense that if the employment rate was equal to that of the Centre-North, in the South female employment would increase by 1.6 million).
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November 28, 2022 | 10:51am
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