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Almost 40 billion in just five years: between 2019 and 2023. It is the bill, in terms of greater impact of pension spending on GDP, paid to the exceptions to the Fornero law and previous reforms, starting with Quota 100, but also, albeit to a much more limited extent, from Quota 102 and 103. This is quantified by the latest report from the State General Accounting Office on the medium-long term trends of the pension and social-health system, which slightly corrects the forecasts formulated with the Nadef 2023, taking into account the updated framework of the Def 2024 (even if it lacks the programmatic objectives), the latest Istat projection on the demographic trend and the measures introduced in the 2024 budget law to trigger an early retirement squeeze and strengthen the cut of indexation on checks of higher amounts.
From the exemptions to the «Fornero» over 0.4 points of GDP in additional spending per year
The dossier underlines that the various interventions with which, starting from 2004, the reforms launched in the early 1990s were softened, resulting in «an expansion of spending and a relegation in the process of raising the requirements for access to retirement», have produced in the period 2019-2023, in the so-called “national scenario”, “a greater incidence of expenditure in relation to GDP equal to over 0.4 points per year on average”. And among the main measures suspected of this burdening of accounts is Quota 100, the possibility of early exit with 62 years and 38 of payments, which was fully operational on an experimental basis from 2019 to 2021. But the Accounting Office points out that « the years after 2021 will also be affected by the effects of this measure due to the multi-year nature of the period of early retirement allowed”.
Peak spending in 2040: 17% of GDP
The same Mef technicians also highlight how the restrictions introduced by the Meloni government with the last two maneuvers, from the crackdown on the mechanism for indexing pension payments to inflation up to the binding linking of the contributory method for exits with Quota 103, have favored “a slightly lower incidence of spending of around 0.1 percentage points” for the forecast period from 2024 to 2040, the year in which expenditure will reach a peak of 17% of GDP, as already indicated in the Def. The dossier reiterates that at the end of the two-year period 2023-24 the level of the expenditure-GDP ratio will not fall below 15.6% also due to the high level of indexation, “attributable to the significant increase in the inflation rate recorded” from the end of 2021 until last year. A level that should remain substantially unchanged until 2028 and then rise further until 2040 due to the growth in the ratio between the number of pensions and the number of employed induced by the demographic transition, only partly offset by the increase in the minimum requirements for access to retirement .
The positive effects of the contributory method on the accounts
After this surge, from 2044 the impact of pension expenditure on GDP will decrease first gradually and then rapidly, falling to 16% in 2050, and subsequently to 13.9% in 2070, thanks to «the generalized application of the contribution calculation that accompanies to the stabilization, and subsequent trend reversal, of the relationship between the number of pensions and the number of employed”. The Accounting Office also reiterates that all the measures to reform the social security system approved since 2004 have overall generated a reduction in pension spending “equal to over 60 percentage points of GDP, cumulative to 2060”.
