Italian Demographic Decline Hits Labor Force

Are Women The Solution?

Alessandro Camilleri launches Conference on Demographics & The WorkplaceHera Group

This article was originally published in FORBES.

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Italy is now the oldest country in Europe with a population that has been steadily shrinking since 2014. In the past decade, it has lost 1.4 million people - the equivalent of all the residents of Milan, the country’s second largest city. A groundbreaking conference in Bologna, organised by Hera Group, a large Italian utility company, put the issue squarely on the corporate agenda. Titled Demographics & The Workplace, the conference was a wake-up call to business leaders that they ignore these demographic shifts at their peril.

Professor Alessandro Rosina, Professor of Demography and Social Statistics at Milan’s Università Cattolica, set the context. The overlapping trends of decreasing fertility rates and ever-lengthening life expectancy (up to 83 years, on average) are yielding a shrinking labour force and a growing dependency ratio of the expanding older over the shrinking pool of younger. Yesterday’s demographic pyramid is morphing before Italian eyes into a demographic square. 2023 saw the lowest number of births since unification... in 1861. This means that by 2050, a third of Italians will be over 65.

Professor Rosina on Italy's Population Predictions20-first