There is a key passage in the 2015 Report, presented by Tito Boeri, whereas the INPS president seems to be turning to Europe to advocate a change of political line in terms of assessing the sustainability of the pension systems on which, for decades, the Union has been measuring the financial virtues of the Member States' budgets (so much so that the the issue of the retirement age represents one of the most serious and difficult to overcome conflicts in the question of Greece).
Boeri states that "the social sustainability of a pension system matters no less than the financial one". “So much so that – he continues – if workers are condemned to “starvation pensions” it will be necessary to intervene later (perhaps when the elderly become old and disabled) with other monetary transfers.
Yet, with his proposals (is it correct that the president of a social security institution replaces the minister of labor in outlining a new welfare project?), Boeri enters into contradiction with the main request that all social security literature has been recommending for at least half a century , since demography, once dependent on economic inputs, today conditions them in a stringent way.
The Old Continent - Italy above all - will continue to be hit by a demographic cyclone that will make even the most rigorous pension models unsustainable and unfair (as regards the relationship between the generations). As far as life expectancy is concerned, the graphs soar. At birth, for men, it went from an average of 76,7 years in 2010 to 84,6 fifty years later (in Italy from 78,9 to 81,1); for women, respectively from 82,5 to 89,1 (in Italy from 84,2 to 89,7). At the age of 65, in half a century, men will live on average another 22,4 years, women 25,6 years (in Italy 22,9 and 26,1 respectively).
In addition to the effects of demographic trends (completely ignored by Boeri) it will be the needs of employment - net of immigration flows - that will require the lengthening of working life also to ensure more adequate treatment. Assuming, as Tito Boeri does, an exit – rather than a relocation – from the labor market for the unemployed over 55s and an opportunistic and economically penalized flexibility for going into retirement, it means working against the future.
On the other hand, it is necessary to accept, first of all on a cultural level, that you will have to work longer and invest, therefore, in policies in favor of active ageing, rather than retiring people who are still able to carry out an activity. What is the point, in fact, of allocating significant resources to welfare services - however modest - instead use them in incentives for active policies to reintroduce the over 55s into the labor market?
