ROME (ITALPRESS) – “Even in 2023, the Inps was able to guarantee citizens and businesses the many services the institute is responsible for, improving the average quality of the services provided and confirming its role as the main pillar of Italian public welfare, contributing in a decisive way to the maintenance of the country’s social cohesion.” This was said by Civ President Roberto Ghiselli at the presentation of Inps’ Social Report 2023 at the Wedekind Palace. “Economic and employment trends and the regulatory changes introduced in recent years have strongly conditioned the activity of the institution,” added Civ Vice President Guido Lazzarelli. “In an employment context that sees, as of 2021, an overall growth of those insured to the Institute (with a positive balance of 523,000 employed in 2023), although compared to the previous year, there was a reduction in permanent hires, by 54,000, and a growth in fixed-term hires of 81,000.” The number of hours used and workers benefiting from the Ordinary Supplementary Benefits Fund also grew, from 525,018 in 2022 to 583,129 in 2023, as did those who benefited from unemployment benefits, from 3,145,632 to 3,246,384 users. A significant figure is that of the number of foreign workers tracked, which amounts to 10.7 percent, a percentage that exceeds 25 percent among new hires: a figure that, when combined with the continuing negative natural balance of the population (-321,000 in 2023), highlights how important the component of legal immigrant workers is now for the country’s economic and welfare system. All data on employment levels, contractual conditions, pay and pension levels highlight the persistence of still significant gender discrimination.Men’s average gross weekly wages in 2023 were 643 euros, 28.34 percent higher than the average 501 euros earned by women. The gender gap in wages is most evident in the private sector, where the average daily wage is 77.6 euros for women and 104.4 for men (+34.54%). In the public sector, average pay rises, but the gap between men and women narrows slightly, to 27.78 percent: women take an average of 110.5 euros per day and men 141.2. In 2023, total social security pensions paid were 837,399, which is 40,969 less than in the previous year (-4.66 percent) and 69,000 less than in 2021. “This is due to several factors, just think of the restrictive regulatory interventions on some early retirement tools such as Women’s Option and Quota 100 and the disincentive element inherent in the contribution-based system, now prevalent in the calculation of new pensions. A downward trend in retirements that will be further accentuated in the current year, particularly with regard to Quota 103 with the contribution-based recalculation currently in force,” Ghiselli stressed. On the other hand, the number of liquidated civil disability pensions and allowances is growing, rising over the two-year period from 583,628 to 613,203. During 2023, citizenship income beneficiaries decreased by 57.14 percent compared to the previous year, from 1,039,700 to 445,541, while the number of beneficiaries of the Single Allowance expanded significantly to 6,510,425 households, compared to about 2.5 million for the old family allowances. For Lazzarelli, “the management of administrative litigation is positive as stocks are drastically reduced from 145,000 to 93,000,” while stocks of court litigation are also reduced. On the supervisory front, inspections in the two-year period were further reduced from 10,576 to 9,202, as inspectors dropped from 884 to 828, while tax evasion ascertained rose from 719 to 821 million euros. Documentary supervision audits, on the other hand, grew from 103,000 to 162,000 in the two-year period. Positive is the reduction in the number of irregular Durc issued to companies, which fell from 17.3 percent to 16.3 percent. Substantially stable waiting times for civil disability visits, 144 days, but with strong territorial differentiations ranging from 53 to 248 days. In assessing the overall results achieved by the Inps in 2023, it should be borne in mind that in the first part of the year, the number of staff had fallen below 23,000, and the nearly 5,000 hires made during 2023 made it possible to reach 26,316 employees at the end of the year, through an induction and training process that affected the Institute’s ordinary activity.(ITALPRESS).-Photo: xi2/Italpress-
