Ciao, bambini!

Italy's steep drop in young people is foreshadowing a crisis of our own

This original artwork was created with the assistance of DALL-E.

PALERMO, Sicily — The ancient castle town of Erice, perched high above Italy’s small coastal port city of Trapani in western Sicily, has preserved much of its medieval character.

While on a story shoot in Rome this past week, I squeezed in a short flight to Sicily, and visited Erice’s Instagrammable, walled hamlet of small churches, stone houses and public gardens—to explore for #NewRules some of Italy’s current cultural and economic challenges, including those facing people living outside this nation’s urban strongholds.

Walking along Erice’s quiet streets and terraced look-outs offering dramatic views of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the rolling hills leading East, towards Palermo, I wondered why anyone would ever want to leave this picturesque region of Italy. But then, after wandering into Erice’s town center, I noticed some of the buildings were etched with graffiti and deeply cracked, their windows boarded—an irony not lost on me nor my Millennial hosts.

Erice’s Norman-built castle was constructed over the ruins of the town’s Temple of Venus Erycina, the ancient goddess of fertility—yet here, now, the region’s birth rate is plummeting. Across Italy, it is declining, and at one of the fastest rates in the West, contributing to the emptying of this region’s once bustling rural towns and slowing its economy. Italy’s national birthrate stands at 1.24, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain, much less grow, the population.

It’s not all that is worrying local economists. This region is also being hit by the double whammy of a declining population of skilled GenZ and Millennial workers who are increasingly emigrating out of Italy to find suitable work and better wages, leaving those with less education and training both jobless and behind. In Sicily, this group is called the NEETs: Neither in Employment nor in Education or Training, and here, they represent 38 percent of Sicily’s population. Many are still living at home with their older parents—whose population is doing the opposite, increasing quickly. Global economists studying Italy’s rapidly expanding population of elderly citizens call it “a silver tsunami.”

The challenge

According to ISTAT, Italy’s national statistics agency, there are now five elderly people living in Italy for every child here under the age of six. Additionally, ISTAT, in a 2023 report, dismissed widespread claims that Italy’s strong tourism industry and the post-COVID uptick in foreign real estate investments would cover the predicted loss in tax revenues from the flight of skilled workers and the rising cost of government support for the nation’s expanding elderly population. The population shifts, the agency warned, would require far more funding than tourism and real estate deals, alone, could provide.

As in the United States, these shifts have begun to kick up a diverse and divided debate among Italian policymakers. The shifts also are beginning to pop up on the policy radars of many other nations—including China, Brazil, Chile, Germany and France. Japan, like Italy, has been grappling with this issue for years. Low birth rates hold back economies and they eat away at support structures for older people, too. Here in Italy, chiefly here in Sicily, the modern infrastructure to support work and family life has been sparse; child care is spotty.

“The reality of the gray new world is making Italy a test laboratory for many Western countries with (lowering birth rates and) aging populations,” says Alessandro Rosina, a leading Italian demographer and author of A Demographic History of Italy. Rosina told The New York Times recently that if Italy “does not get serious” about encouraging young families and working women to have more children—or, at least in the short term, allowing increased immigration—“Italy will remain and forever be a country that gets older.” In 2015, Italy’s median age was 44.4 years. Today, it’s 47.7 years, and recent forecasts predict it could rise to 53.6 years by 2050, a figure economists say would create economic paralysis, unless increased immigration and new policies are adopted soon to significantly lower the nation’s median age over the next 25 years.

Innovation strategies

Italy’s first female Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, a controversial conservative populist whose election in October 2022 shocked Italy’s political establishment, is also Italy’s first head of state to put the population shift at the top of the government’s domestic policy agenda. During her campaign, supported by the Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-fascist roots, Meloni wooed a majority of voters with her promise to “put faith and Italian families first” with new policies designed to increase the nation’s birth rate while maintaining the nation’s strict limits on immigration. So far, despite rising opposition to her controversial refusal to allow more foreign workers, Meloni has not wavered.

Her 2024 budget focuses on tax cuts and incentives to get Italian women back to work after having children and proposes to exempt women with at least two children from social security contributions. Another proposal to encourage a higher birth rate would offer “free” nursery places for Italian women who opt to have a second child. A recent promise of “no taxes for those who have children” will be up for debate later this spring.

Separately, for the elderly, a new national law put forth by the Meloni administration has been approved to streamline and simplify governmental health care and social services. The law also is designed to help to keep older Italians in their own homes and out of nursing homes. This new “Pact for the Third Age” still needs to be funded, but is meant to lay the foundation for improved health and social programs supported by a combination of government cash benefits and in-kind contributions of products and services.

Elsewhere, other programs, supported by Italian NGOs, are also atracting international attention. In the town of Piacenza, south of Milan, in the country’s most renowned region for childhood education and elder care, there is an experimental project called Elderly and Children Together. It is similar to some of the pre-school and after-school programs being offered in Japan, England and Germany, which mix young children with elderly volunteers. Italy’s program gives an alternative to older people who feel lonely and helps young working families who also need support.

“We’re well past the point of conversation,” notes Bradley Schurman, a co-founder with me of #NewRules and author of The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny. “Societies have had decades to prepare for this shift, yet leaders of the past often chose to kick the proverbial can down the road for the next generation. Today, we need radical leaders who are willing to renegotiate the social contract and reconsider immigration policies, which were long considered to be the “third rail” of politics. Changing the status quo is the only way we get out of this mess to build a more resilient future where everyone benefits.”

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