Pensions, the Fornero reform is not dead: let's save it

“Listen to me friends, Romans, fellow citizens…
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that man does lives beyond him.
Good often remains buried with its bones… and may it be Caesar's”.

With these words Antonio, speaking after Brutus, begins the funeral oration on the corpse of Caesar in William Shakespeare's tragedy. I understand that in my incipit there are some rhetoric and some exaggerated similarities. I am not Antonius; the Fornero reform is not Caesar and has not yet been completely killed. We are at the "bedside" but not the "sepulchre". Above all, the conspirators are not people close to Cesare who enjoyed his trust, but irreducible adversaries who acted for miserable reasons, from which the ex-minister has learned to beware and to avoid them with the contempt they deserve.

Speaking during the press conference for the presentation of the decree on quota 100 and the basic income, Matteo Salvini said: "I dedicate these interventions to Monti and to Fornero“. In an interview a few days earlier he had even stated that the government did not trust the INPS accounts, because the Institute had become involved in politics. Which is serious from many points of view: firstly because it is the INPS called to carry out this task, having at its disposal the indispensable data in an information context that has no equal in our country. Furthermore, imagining that a public body with tens of thousands of employees starts whitewashing the statistics on the orders of President Tito Boeri is only a confirmation of what, according to the new capataz, the administration should do to slavishly comply with the wishes of the government .

Having said all this, it is an act of transparency and clarity to mark the boundary of where (and how) the 2011 reform took place, before its path is interrupted and diverted by the yellow-green decree. The latest publication of the Monitoring of retirement flows (limited to the private sectors) in the years 2017 and 2018 by the Actuarial Coordination of the Institute helps us in this worthy operation-truth (with survey as at 2 January of this year). By observing the statistical indicators of 2018 (see the summary table) is noted a decidedly higher weight of old-age/early pensions on old-age pensions compared to 2017. This because requirements for old-age pensions increased for women, while those for old-age/early pensions remained the same as the previous year and the early exits for the so-called "early workers" are more consistent.

Overall, in 2017 there were 206.779 old-age pensions and 154.714 early/seniority pensions, in 2018 140.752 old-age pensions were disbursed against 125.293 old-age pensions. The most interesting data is that of Employees' Pension Fund (FPLD), where supremacy belongs stably and decisively to advance payments compared to old age benefits: 96 thousand against 58 thousand in 2017; 89 thousand against 40 thousand in 2018. As can be seen in the table the average amount of the old-age allowance is almost double the old-age one: which depends on the fact that the former have to enforce a seniority of contributions higher than the second one. But the relationship between the two types of pension, in the Fpld, is well summarized in the following terms: set equal to 100 the number of old-age pensions in 2017 that of early pensions was equal to 166; in 2018 to 222. More relevant, again in the Fpld, are the gender statistics which also express a consolidated trend in relation to the composition and characteristics of the labor market.

While early treatments seem to be a prerogative of males (residents in the North), the opposite occurs for old age.

The donkey falls when you go to look the average age at the commencement of old-age and old-age pensions.

In 2017, the following data was found:

• old age: males 66,6 years, females 64,9 years; total 65,8 years
• seniority: males 61,1 years, females 59,9 years; total 60,8 years

In 2018:

• old age: males 66,5 years, females 65,9; total 66,3 years;
• seniority: males 61 years, females 60,1 years; total 60,7 years.

We stop here. We just need to remember (in articulo mortis?) that, despite the "notorious" (the definition is by Luigi Di Maio at the press conference) Fornero reform, Italians have continued, for the most part, to retire long before the age of 67 (or even 70): the age that is exhibited in the talk shows that do not hesitate to deal with these complex topics in the same way as the patrons of the billiard room of the Bar Sport.