May 24, 2007. Yesterday the Istituto nazionale di statistica (ISTAT) released its annual report of facts and figures. The report sums up the statistics for 2006. Reacting to the findings, Prime Minister Romano Prodi observed that Italy’s three most worrisome problems are an aging population, widening economic gap between North and South, and the difficulties new applicants, especially women and young people, run into when trying to find a job. The job situation in Italy, declared Prodi, is more comparable to that in North Africa than in the rest of Europe.

People are being born less frequently in Italy, but they are living longer. The ratio of those under 15 to those over 65 is 100 to 141. Only Japan, with a ratio of 100 to 154, has an older population. The birthrate, which went below 2 children per adult woman in the mid-1970s and reached an all-time low of 1.19 in 1995, is holding at 1.35. Life expectancy here—78.3 years for men and 84 years for women (as against 77.6 and 83.2 in 2005)—is the highest aggregate in Europe (though in Sweden the men live longer) and among the highest in the world. Attempts to explain why cite the Mediterranean diet and improvements in national health care.

14.7% of Italian families (one out of six) say they have difficulty stretching out the family income till the end of the month. In the South, this figure rises to 22.3%. In Sicily, the hardest hit region, 11.1% of families (2.5 million) live below the poverty line. The average monthly wage for an Italian family in 2004 was around 2,750 euros. In the same period 57% of Italians declared no change in their incomes from the previous year, while 5.3% said they earned substantially less. The average family income in Lombardy it was more than 32,000 euros, whereas in Sicily was 2,100, three quarters as much.

The aging of Italy’s population is somewhat offset by the very high number of immigrants, for the most part young men and women looking for work. As of January 2006, Italy’s officially registered immigrants numbered over 2.7 million or 4.7% of the general population. They come from all over the world, including the Philippines, China, Pakistan, Ukraine and Bangladesh, but one third of the overall total comes from three countries: Romania (271,000), Albania (257,000) and Morocco (240,000). 88% of them live in the large towns of northern and central Italy. Foreigners make up 32% of the prison population. Mixed marriages between (mostly male) Italians and foreigners, though still rare, are becoming more common. Last year they made up 13.5% of all marriages, compared with 4.8% in 1995. The number of women immigrants is now equal to that of men and the number of immigrant couples is on the rise.

My next blog will report on Italy’s May 12 Family Day. Why did its organizers give the Rome demonstration an English name? Maybe because, for all the political rhetoric that the event occasioned, Italy is the European state that devotes the smallest proportion of its annual expenditures to the family: a mere 4.4% compared with a European average of 7.8%.