More than a third of Italy’s population will be over 65 in 2050
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
A shrinking and ageing population is a major worry for the euro zone's third-largest country.
PHOTO: REUTERS
DeeperDive is a beta AI feature. Refer to full articles for the facts.
ROME – More than a third of Italy’s population will be over the age of 65 by 2050, up from about a quarter in 2022, the country’s statistics office Istat said on Thursday, offering more evidence of a serious demographic crisis.
In a report, Istat also estimated that the ratio between people of working age, those aged 15 to 64, and people who are too young or too old to work, those aged zero to 14 or 65 and above “will decrease from about three to two in 2022 to about one to one in 2050”.
A shrinking and ageing population is a major worry for the euro zone’s third-largest country.
It has led to falling economic productivity and higher welfare costs in a country with the highest pension bill in the 38-nation Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
According to Istat, Italy’s population is set to decline to 54.4 million people by 2050 from 59 million in 2022, when births dropped to a new historic low of under 400,000.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has made it a priority to tackle the issue since taking power in 2022, pledging to provide more support to families who want to have children.
Ms Meloni said in September that she does not believe immigration can be a solution to the demographic crisis affecting Italy and the rest of Europe.
Italy’s school population will shrink by one million in the coming decade because of plunging birth rates and continuing brain drain, Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said in May, calling it an “alarming” scenario. REUTERS
