It's raining in the north, it's sunny in the south. To the north is the plain, to the south is the sea. In the north there are industries, in the south there are fields. In the north people work, in the south as well, but the workers are paid differently. Commonplaces and trivializations aside, the latest Istat data confirm a sad reality: wages between north and south are polar opposites and have grown at different speeds in recent years.
Istat has published for the first time a series of indicators on fair and sustainable well-being in the 110 Italian provinces and metropolitan cities within the report "Measures of fair and sustainable well-being of the territories".
According to the survey of the National Statistical Institute: "In the North, in 2016 the average income of an employee was around 24.400 euros compared to 16.100 euros for a worker in the South", with a gap of over 8.000 euros per year , which in 2009 was equal to 6.300 euros.
The average income from employment in the province of Milan, at the top of the ranking with 29.628 euros per year, is about two and a half times higher than that of workers in the province of Vibo Valentia, which stands at around 12.118 euros of an annual national average of 21.715 euros. Indicative of this trend is that the first 22 provinces, net of Rome which in third position remunerates its workers with an average of 23.300 euros per year, are all located in Northern Italy.
The unemployment rate represents another scourge for Italy, with a notable difference between north and south: the worst figures come from Calabria (22,3%), Campania (22,2) and Sicily (23,1%) . The best result at national level is that of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano with an unemployment rate of 2,9%.
There are also differences in the level of education: the cities of the South lag behind the other areas of the peninsula. “The share of the population with at least a high school diploma marks a distance between the area with the greatest advantage overall, the Centre, and the South, which is more disadvantaged”, reads the notes from the Statistical Institute. “This distance has grown over time: almost 12 percentage points in 2016 against 8 in 2004″. The same result for graduates between the ages of 25 and 39, who are 8,4 percent less in the South than in the North.
