The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) yesterday offered worrying data: 34% of Italian adolescents, between 11 and 19 years old, want to emigrate abroad. Only 45% want to stay in Italy, while 21% have not yet decided. The majority of these young people want to go to the US, the favorite destination followed by Spain and the United Kingdom.
This is an unencouraging situation in a country with a serious problem of population aging and youth unemployment. This 2023, Italy once again broke its negative birth record, with an average of 1.2 children per woman. The current population is almost 59 million Italians, 7,000 less than the previous year. There are fewer and fewer young people, and the challenge is that the new generations, in a clear situation of employment disadvantage compared to other similar countries, choose to stay at home and feed the social protection system. In 2023, only 10.3 million Italian citizens were between 18 and 34 years old, 3 million less than in 2002.
Last week, Istat published another report indicating that more than 67% of Italians between 18 and 34 years old still live with their parents, a figure that has risen eight points in the last twenty years, compared to 59.7 % of 2002. The situation is especially serious in the south of the country. In Campania, for example, 75.4% of young people have not yet emancipated themselves. Although Italy recorded GDP growth of 0.9%, this was not reflected in a reduction in youth precariousness. Many cannot emancipate themselves or think about starting a family because they have extremely precarious contracts. In fact, statistics also say that half of the more than three million limited-term contracts are for those under 24 years of age in this country. The situation is, again, more difficult in the most impoverished regions of southern Italy. There, in regions such as Campania or Sicily, the youth unemployment rate reaches 30%.
The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has placed the dramatic drop in the birth rate as one of the priorities of her Executive, but according to analysts her measures do not solve some of the underlying problems, such as job insecurity or the difficulty of conciliation. The climate in the country is very tense since Meloni allowed European funds to finance the entry of anti-abortionists into Italian clinics.
