“Young people no longer want to work in factories.” “Young people no longer take part in public competitions”. "There is a lack of young doctors and nurses." “The school no longer attracts young teachers.” "Young people prefer to work in call centers." “Young people are going abroad”.
Which of these statements-opinions is it definitely true? The third, which underlines the very strong shortage of new healthcare personnel, although young people are lacking in any profession. The last one is also true, but the young people who leave they are only a part of the population, albeit a very significant one, as we will see. The other sentences are suppositions that arise from the same factual observation: the difficulty in finding young people to fill vacant jobs.
A difficulty, however, that does not arise primarily from changes in youth preferences or from the pur inadequate palatability of the working conditions offered (which pushes many to leave the country). Both can certainly play a role, albeit a marginal one. In fact, that difficulty originates from very strong reduction in the young population. A reduction that has occurred over the last twenty years and will continue equally marked between now and 2040. In other words, young people may have become more choosy, as a former minister of the Italian Republic said unhappily, but it is their absolute decrease the real cause of the problems in finding them on the job market.
The rarefaction of young people is the first and most direct consequence of demographic ice age, as the North East Foundation defines it, while everyone is still talking about winter. However, winter is a season in the annual cycle, which is always followed by spring, that is, the rebirth of nature prepared by winter itself. Here, however, we don't see any springs at all and, on the contrary, the birth rate decline, from which the glaciation began, is accentuating.
All the numbers of the halving of young people in Northern Italy
How much has the number of young people decreased? And by how much will they decrease? First of all, let's limit the territory, the time horizon and the very definition of young people. As in the previous two Notes on the topic of demographic glaciation, the territory is the Northern Italy, because it is the engine of the Italian economy, divided into two macro-areas and individual regions. The time horizon is 2002-2040: 2002 because the majority of today's young people were already born then; and 2040 because the young people of that time are already born today. This allows us to make some calculations and reasoning without having to resort to demographic forecasts, which are by nature random, and to isolate the demographic phenomena within each territory. Young people are people aged 18-34, i.e. between the beginning of adulthood and the end of any possible course of study. Once the analysis perimeter has been defined, here are the numbers.
In 2002 there were 5,8 million young people in Northern Italy, in 2023 they dropped to 4,7 million, a fifth less. The smallest decline occurred in Trentino (-8 thousand, -7%), followed bySouth Tyrol (-10 thousand, -9%; Table 1). Among the large northern regions, the worst result, in percentage terms, which take size into account, is that of Piemonte (-23%), with Veneto second to last at a gap (-22%); while theEmilia Romagna records the best figure (-14%), ahead of the Lombardia (-17%).
Things would have been much worse without contributions from other territories, Italians and otherwise. The latter data can be easily obtained by taking in 2002 the resident population aged 1-17 years, who in 2019 would have been 18-34 years old, and in 2019 the resident population aged 14-30 years, who in 2023 would have still been 18-34 years old. The result is that young people in Northern Italy would have gone from 5,8 to 3,6 million in 2023, -38%. Going forward by 2040 there would be a decline of another 698 thousand units, -20%. In total, in 2002-40 the drop became 2,9 million, halving the 2002 values.
Without external contributions, the worst performance among the large northern regions would have been that ofEmilia Romagna (-43%, -375 thousand in 2002-23), followed by Lombardia (-39%, -812 thousand), from Piemonte (-39%, -352 thousand) and from Veneto (-35%, -375 thousand).
Very different attractiveness between regions
If with external contributions Emilia-Romagna is the best and without the worst, it means that it has been capable of attracting many young people. How many? It is possible to answer this question and also distinguish whether the contributions were from within or from abroad. The most direct way would be to use ISTAT data on migratory flows. For simplicity of processing, the indirect method was used here, consisting of the difference between the young resident population and that which would have existed based on the past age composition.
The numbers that emerge are a indicator of revealed attractiveness: the higher the share of external contributions in relation to the population in 2002, the higher the attractiveness, and vice versa.
Based on the attractiveness revealed by the behavior of young people or, better yet, by their movements within Italy and abroad, theEmilia-Romagna stands out with 29%, followed by the Lombardia with 21%. The average in the North is 20%. All the Triveneto is positioned below, with the Veneto at 14%, the Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Trentino at 18% el'South Tyrol al 12%.
The breakdown between contributions from Italy and abroad is also very interesting. From the rest of Italy the maximum attractiveness revealed is recorded byEmilia Romagna, with 16%, followed by Lombardia with 11% and from Trentino with 10%; last theSouth Tyrol with 1% and second to last the Veneto with 5%, together with the Valle d'Aosta. From abroad we once again find theEmilia Romagna, with 13%, tied with the Liguria (13%), Lombardia e South Tyrol (11%), Friuli-Venezia Giulia (10%). The Veneto and the Trentino they are paired in the lower part of the ranking with 8%, not much above the last one which is Valle d'Aosta with 6%.
The contributions from within were mainly from the Center and above all from the South of Italy, although there was no lack of internal movements in the North, attracted by Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. In the future these streams will dry up significantly because the base of young people in the South and Center of the country has shrunk and will shrink as in the North of the country, if not more rapidly, as many have already moved from there and are afflicted by the same demographic ice age.
Of course it must be considered that the contributions from abroad they are predominantly from countries non-EU citizens or from Eastern Europe. To get an idea of this composition, it is enough to observe the net inflows of young people aged 18-34 from abroad into Northern Italy between 2010 and 2021: of the 637 thousand arrivals, three quarters are non-EU, with a very significant weight Of Albania, Morocco and Nigeria. These are populations with levels of education significantly lower than those in Italy. In this sense, the regions that have a greater contribution from within Italy are advantaged, in terms of human capital, compared to those that have it mainly from abroad. Here Trentino and Emilia-Romagna stand out, while they are at the bottom Alto Adige, Liguria, Piedmont and Veneto.
It could be argued that it is useless to attract many young people if you don't need it. And therefore the lower attractiveness revealed corresponds to a lower need to attract young people from outside and does not derive from a lower ability to attract them. In fact, comparing the 2002-23 decline in the population of 18-34 year olds without external contributions and the attractiveness revealed in the northern regions, a strong relationship emerges between the two quantities: the less severe the decline, the lower the attractiveness.
But there is a "big but". With the same decline, there are regions that have attracted more and others that attracted less. One way to see this is to observe the distance between the actual revealed attractiveness and that which should have been achieved to keep the population of 18-34 year olds unchanged (in the graph the invariance is represented by the bisector line). No northern region has achieved the ideal revealed attractiveness.
The territory that has come closest is the Trentino, Followed by South Tyrol ed Emilia Romagna, which thus sees its high attractiveness confirmed. Then, not far away, there Lombardia, while all the others are far behind, with Veneto second to last among the large regions. At the bottom of the ranking of all regions is the Friuli Venezia Giulia, penultimate la Valle d'Aosta and third to last the Piemonte. All of them, including Veneto, with a lack of attractiveness equal to or greater than twenty-two percentage points.
The reduction in the number of young people is the backdrop to two phenomena which reveal youth hardship in the Northern territories and which aggravate the consequences of that reduction. I'm there diaspora towards other advanced nations, especially European, e the high standard of NEET compared to European values. We will return to both in the last Note, dedicated to the policies necessary to deal with the effects of demographic ice age on the economic system.
Here we represent the data on the diaspora of young Italians from the regions of Northern Italy in 2011-21, in absolute value and in relation to the number of young people present in 2021 and taking into account their systematic underestimation. In this case we are talking about people under 40 years old. It emerges that a significant portion of the actual decrease in young people in 2002-2023 is explained by their emigration. If we consider that the official data underestimate the phenomenon by three times, the actual shortage of young people is higher than what is reported in this Note.
The sharp decline in young people puts in serious difficulty Italy's full participation in green and digital revolutions (being young people more sensitive to environmental issues and digital natives), tends to further reduce the birth rate (reducing the number of potential parents), recomposes consumption of goods to the detriment of service content, reduces both adaptability of the socio-economic system to changes and the ability to learning at work, decreases birth of new businesses and the innovation connected to it, discourages them investments of businesses, unable to find staff. In other words, the country's growth potential decreases also on the productivity side.
