Ciao bambini: the birth rate plummets in Italy

When Daniela Vicino started teaching in Sicily, in southern Italy, about 30 years ago, she had around 30 students per class.. A figure that has been reduced by almost half over the decades due to the drop in the birth rate. Now it has between “18 to 20 students at most and in some cases between 15 and 16,” he told Caltagirone, a town in southeastern Sicily. “It's very painful,” he confesses..

Italy has long had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, but the situation has been made even worse by the coronavirus pandemic.. Last year, Italy's population dropped from nearly 400,000, it lost roughly the equivalent of a large city like Florence.. It has a total of 59.3 million inhabitants, as the death toll soared, births plummeted and immigration slowed.

Fewer children today means fewer adults in the future, who work and contribute with their taxes to the State, so the country will not only be less productive but it will have difficulties to maintain the standard of living of an aging population..

For some time this phenomenon has worried Western societies and in particular Italy, one of the least dynamic economies among the most industrialized countries.. Promising to tackle the problem, Prime Minister Mario Draghi has programmed more nursery schools, help for working women and easy access to home loans for young couples under the colossal €221 billion (267 billion euro) programme. dollars) to reactivate the economy with funds from the European Union.

“To put young people in a position to start a family, we must meet three requirements: adequate social protection, a roof and a stable job,” Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank (ECB), explained before Parliament.

The Italian social protection system is currently focused on the elderly, and pension payments and health spending absorb the largest part of the budget, leaving few resources for the younger generations.

No job opportunities

Hit by the economic crisis, the city of Caltagirone, located on top of a hill and famous for its colorful ceramics and baroque architecture, registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a concrete example of the current demographic crisis.

The annual number of births halved between 1999 and 2019, from 532 to 265, according to the National Institute of Statistics (Istat), making it one of the ten Italian cities where the birth rate has plummeted the most.. “These figures do not surprise me,” the mayor of Caltagirone, Gino Ioppolo, told AFP, who attributes part of the drop to external factors, in particular the closure in 2019 of a large migrant camp in Mineo, a neighboring town, which used the local maternity.

The director of a local school, former mayor Franco Pignataro, estimates that the number of his students has fallen by about a third in the last 15-20 years.. “In recent years the situation has gotten much worse,” he observes, after explaining that young people leave Caltagirone en masse because “there are no job opportunities”

Luca Giarmana, 27, still lives in Caltagirone, although he feels like a minority: of his thirty high school classmates, 90% have left and only one has had a child. “It is due to the general decline of the economy in the last 20 years, to the difficulties in finding a job and a stable situation, essential conditions to found a family,” he summarizes.- 1.24 children per woman -For years, Italy has registered a progressive fall in the number of births. For example, from 534,000 in 2012 it went to 404,000 in 2020, a year marked by the pandemic.

Istat forecasts a new drop with 384,000-393,000 births for 2021, mainly due to the pandemic, a trend that is registered in many countries. Last December and January, nine months after the covid-19 spread in Italy, births fell in a year of 10% and 14% respectively.. As part of its strategy to halt population decline, the government is working on a bill to introduce more generous support for families with children, which also introduces longer paternity leave.. However, it will take several years before the measures have an impact.. According to opinion studies, Italian couples on average want to have two children, even though the fertility level was 1.24 children per woman in 2020.