Italian plan to bridge economic gap between North and South
2023.01.25 14:08
Italian plan to bridge economic gap between North and South
By Ray Johnson
Budrigannews.com – According to ISTAT, the statistics bureau, Italy’s south is on track for a “demographic tsunami” if it does not use pandemic recovery funds from the European Union to catch up to the productive north.
Italy, the EU’s largest recipient, intends to use a significant portion of the roughly 200 billion euros (217.56 billion dollars) it is due for social and territorial cohesion-related projects, including closing its deep north-south divide.
The south will receive at least 40% of the total cost.
Rome is behind schedule in investing the Recovery Fund funds it has received from Brussels and has a history of notoriously inefficient grant use.
According to ISTAT, the funds could be used to help bring the north and the south on equal footing in ten key areas, such as education, digitalization, and gross domestic product per capita.
This would help keep young Italians from leaving the south in search of better economic and employment opportunities in the north or elsewhere.
For decades, the bureau has recorded youth employment rates that are significantly lower than the national average. According to ISTAT, in densely populated urban areas like Palermo, Taranto, and Naples, only one in three people under the age of 35 had a job in 2021.
For the first time since its records began, it predicted that the population of the “Mezzogiorno,” which includes Sicily and Sardinia as well as Italy’s six southern regions, would fall below 20 million in 2030.
Additionally, as a result of youth migration, the regions’ average age will surpass that of the center-north in about 2035.
According to the report, “the consequences of the delays in (developing) the south are heightening the frailties in its socio-economic structure through a kind of “demographic tsunami.”
“The existing trends could lead to a progressive and unsustainable involution of the human capital of most of southern Italy if this cannot be stopped.”
The issues extend beyond the south. The third economy of the Eurozone has suffered for a long time from a shrinking workforce and stagnant growth.
Birth deterrence is frequently cited as a lack of job security and affordable child care, while an aging population reduces productivity, restricts innovation, and raises welfare costs.
According to a September ISTAT report, Italy had fewer than 400 thousand births in 2021, the fewest since its unification in 1861. The bureau’s baseline scenario predicted a population decline of 54.2 million in 2050 and 47.7 million in 2070, down from 59.2 million in 2021.
