ROME (ITALPRESS) – Italy is floating between positive and negative records: good on employment and foreign tourism, bad on birth rate, denier rate, public debt and democratic participation. This is what emerges from the 58th Censis report, which photographs the country’s social situation. The research institute highlights the presence of the “Italian syndrome”: continuity in the middle, in which we remain trapped, neither ruinous tumbles in recessionary phases, nor heroic climbs in positive cycles. But it hides a pitfall. If the middle class becomes frayed (incomes are 7 percent lower than 20 years ago) anti-Westernism ferments and faith in liberal democracies, Europeanism and Atlanticism sours: 66 percent of Italians blame the West for ongoing conflicts and only 31 percent agree with NATO’s call for increased military spending. Meanwhile, the war of sexual, ethnic-cultural, and religious identities, vying for recognition, flares up.
While a morphological mutation of the nation is taking place (Italy is first in Europe for acquisitions of citizenship:
+112% in ten years). Are we culturally prepared? In the land of the ignorant, for 19% Mazzini was a politician of the First Republic and for 32% the Sistine Chapel was frescoed by Giotto or Leonardo. Here are the accounts that don’t add up in system-Italy: more work and less GDP, tourism up and industry
down, staff shortages and welfare mortgages. For Censis, the country is moving around a waterline.
Over the past two decades (2003-2023), gross disposable income per capita has shrunk in real terms by 7.0 percent. And in the last decade (between the second quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2024) per capita net wealth has also declined by 5.5 percent. 85.5% of Italians now believe that it is very difficult to climb the social ladder.
Going into the details of the report, we read that the erosion of the middle class’s paths of economic and social ascent is matched by a growing aversion to the values constituting the collective agenda of the past. The abstention rate in the last European elections set a record in republican history with 51.7 percent (in the first direct elections to the European Parliament, in 1979, abstentionism stopped at 14.3 percent). For 71.4 percent of Italians, the European Union is destined to fall apart without radical reforms. As for the school system, they do not reach the learning goals in Italian: 24.5 percent of pupils at the end of primary school, 39.9 percent at the end of middle school, 43.5 percent at the end of high school (in vocational schools the figure soars to 80.0 percent).
In math: 31.8 percent in primary, 44.0 percent in middle school, and 47.5 percent in high school (the peak is still in vocational colleges, with 81.0 percent). On the economic front despite the less than encouraging signs about the GDP trend, the number of employed people stood at 23,878,000 in the average of the first six months of the year, an increase of 1.5 million jobs compared to the black year of the pandemic and an increase of 4.6 percent compared to 2007. But the gap between the Italian employment rate (we are last in Europe) and the European average still remains significant: 8.9 percentage points less in 2023.The output of Italian manufacturing activities has entered a downward spiral: -1.2 percent between 2019 and 2023. Comparing the first eight months of 2024 with the same period in 2023 reveals a 3.4 percent drop. In contrast, tourist presences in Italy reached 447 million in 2023, an increase of 18.7% compared to 2013. In 2023, the share of hard-to-find professional figures in relation to the needs of businesses reached 45.1 percent of total expected recruitment (it was 21.5 percent in 2017). Above all, the weight of hard-to-find figures due to the scarcity of candidates has increased: from 9.7 percent of total planned hiring in 2017 to 28.4 percent in 2023. Suffering are young people: 58.1 percent, aged 18-34, feel fragile, 56.5 percent feel lonely, 51.8 percent say they suffer from anxiety states or depression, 32.7 percent from panic attacks, and 18.3 percent complain of eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia. Only in a few cases does it lead to a true overt pathology: one in three young people (29.6% of the total) has been treated by a psychologist, and 16.8% take sleeping pills or psychotropic drugs.
(ITALPRESS).
-Photo: Censis press office-
Censis, Italy floats between negative and positive records
