{"id":7283,"date":"2024-01-08T09:34:33","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T14:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/?p=7283"},"modified":"2024-01-08T09:34:35","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T14:34:35","slug":"boosting-italys-birthrate-has-become-a-patriotic-cause-for-the-far-right-but-its-an-idea-thats-doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/08\/boosting-italys-birthrate-has-become-a-patriotic-cause-for-the-far-right-but-its-an-idea-thats-doomed\/","title":{"rendered":"Boosting Italy\u2019s birthrate has become a patriotic cause for the far right. But it\u2019s an idea that\u2019s doomed"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the country\u2019s population tumbling, what Italy really needs is greater immigration, yet how could Giorgia Meloni sanction that?<\/h3>
<\/div>

The Guardian – <\/em><\/strong>Fifty years ago in Italy, there was one person over 65 for every child aged six or under. Just before Christmas, Italy\u2019s national statistics office, Istat, revealed that\u00a0the ratio is now 5.6 to 1<\/a>. The population pyramid has been inverted, with 24% of the Italian population\u00a0now over 65<\/a>.<\/p>

With the death rate rising every year, the Italian population decreases by around 180,000 people per annum. The population has just dipped below 59 million and if current trends continue it\u2019s likely that by 2070 it will fall to 48 million<\/a>.<\/p>

One can clearly glimpse this ageing society with the naked eye. There are so many elderly men milling around Italian cities that the\u00a0umarell<\/a><\/em>\u00a0phenomenon<\/a>\u00a0has become a meme: it\u2019s an affectionate term for pensioners who, with hands behind backs, gather round building sites to watch the progress.<\/p>

Meanwhile, the base of the population pyramid is ever slimmer. In 2022, there were only\u00a0392,500 births<\/a>\u00a0in the whole country and the fertility rate now stands at 1.25. In Sardinia the situation is even more marked, with a fertility rate of 0.95.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

So schools are constantly closing around the country: 2,600 infant and junior schools<\/a> have shut in the last nine years and it\u2019s estimated that, within a decade, there will be a million<\/a><\/strong>and a half fewer pupils<\/a>, meaning more closures. Many remote, rural villages are now ghost towns, filling up only during the long summer holidays.<\/p>

In almost every statistic affecting fertility, Italy is now an outlier. The country holds the European record for the highest age of first-time mothers (31.4). That\u2019s partly because an astonishing 70.5% of 18- to 34-year-old Italians<\/a> are still living with their parents, an effective contraceptive if ever there was one.<\/p>

The lack of births is also basic economics: according to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Italy is the only country where real wages actually\u00a0declined between 1990 and 2020<\/a>: the average gross salary of\u00a0almost \u20ac27,000 (\u00a323,500)<\/a>\u00a0is 12% below the European average and 23% below that of Germany. <\/p>

\u201cThere\u2019s no way I could afford to have a child,\u201d Chiara, a 32-year-old friend, told me.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

\"\"
\u2018The issue of the country\u2019s demographic crisis is shooting up the political agenda because Giorgia Meloni\u2019s nationalistic government sees in the birthrate \u2013 as did Benito Mussolini \u2013 a symbol of patriotic vigour.\u2019 Meloni in Rome, 17 December 2023.\u00a0Photograph: Alessandro Serran\/Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Such rock-bottom salaries mean that most aspiring parents both have to work, but in reality only 51.3% of working-age women in Italy<\/a> are actually in employment (compared with more than 70% in Germany and the UK, and 68% in France).<\/p>

Professor Arnstein Aassve, a Norwegian-born demographer at Milan\u2019s Bocconi University, tells me: \u201cThere\u2019s something that\u2019s just not working in Italy: it\u2019s as if young people can\u2019t launch somehow.\u201d He points to the fact that Italy has the second-highest proportion of 15- to 29-year-old \u201cNeets\u201d (those \u201cnot in education, employment or training\u201d) in the European Union:19%, compared to an EU-wide average of 11.7%. Meanwhile many of the most able, ambitious Italians have fled abroad for better opportunities: of the 5.8 million Italians who live overseas, 36.3% are under 34<\/a>.<\/p>

It has often been suggested that there are fewer births in Italy because, paradoxically, the family is so predominant. Given Italy\u2019s wafer-thin welfare state provision, families are over-burdened by picking up the slack: constantly looking after parents or grandchildren, providing transport, daycare and housing solutions. It\u2019s as if the duties to one family prevents the creation of another.<\/p>

The issue of the country\u2019s demographic crisis is shooting up the political agenda because Giorgia Meloni\u2019s nationalistic government sees in the birthrate \u2013 as did Benito Mussolini \u2013 a symbol of patriotic vigour. In the past, she has often invoked a conspiracy theory<\/a> (known as the \u201cgreat replacement\u201d) suggesting elites are deliberately replacing native, white Europeans, with immigrants. So for her, the birthrate is about racial survival. She has appointed<\/a> an anti-abortion minister for family and attended rallies to raise the number of newborns to 500,000 per annum.<\/p>

Mussolini introduced a punitive tax on bachelors, and Meloni has halved the VAT on nappies and baby milk. But nudging the masses to have families is notoriously difficult. And even if people do decide to have more children, those offspring only enter the workforce, and become taxpayers, two decades later.<\/p>

There is a much quicker solution, often raised by Italian demographers, but it is politically problematic for a far-right government: immigration. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

Linda Laura Sabbadini, a director at Istat I spoke to, was adamant that it\u2019s now the only answer. \u201cWe need migrants,\u201d she said. \u201cOnly with more migrants of working age will the population grow immediately and guarantee the pension payments of a rapidly ageing population.\u201d<\/p>

Some, though, suggest Italy shouldn\u2019t even be looking for a solution. FutuRes is an EU-funded research project challenging the familiar narrative that elderly people are a problem and that youth is the answer. Rather than attempting to reverse an inevitable societal trend, its team of demographers, economists and policy experts analyse the numbers to show that, say, the issue isn\u2019t age but health, or that elderly care isn\u2019t necessarily a burden, but a business opportunity.<\/p>

After a century of failed birthrate policies, perhaps that\u2019s the wisest course: to accept that the population pyramid is now inverted and draft policies that take account of that reality, rather than hope to reverse it.<\/p>

Read more here<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the country\u2019s population tumbling, what Italy really needs is greater immigration, yet how could Giorgia Meloni sanction that? The Guardian – Fifty years ago in Italy, there was one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7285,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1738,1477,196,1737,1739],"class_list":{"0":"post-7283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-fertility-rate","9":"tag-immigration","10":"tag-italy","11":"tag-italy-birthrate","12":"tag-meloni-government"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Old-people.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7286,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7283\/revisions\/7286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}