Many Italians – starting, obviously, with cross-border workers – dream of a Ticino salary and for this reason they are or would be willing to cross the border every day. But it’s really true that the perspective with which you look at your neighbor’s garden makes the grass more or less green. Furthermore, on the topic of topics, i.e. that of salaries in francs in the Confederation, this is stated by a study by the Cantonal Statistics Office cited by RSI, which highlights the growth of the salary gap between the Canton of Ticino and the rest of Switzerland, even without consider cross-border workers.
The general difference between salaries in Ticino and those in the rest of Switzerland, in fact, is growing and stands at -23.9% of gross monthly salaries. But in the analysis he also states that, excluding cross-border workers from this count, the salary levels of residents remain a good 14% lower and the gap compared to the rest of Switzerland grows. In other words: the myth that only cross-border commuters, often recipients of lower salaries than the Ticino average but still lavish compared to ‘poor Italy’, collapses the paychecks in the canton, even if in some way an underlying general line can be stated. That is, the fact that in Ticino, absolutely, the possibility for decades of benefiting from an abundance of low-cost labor with lower wages than residents has influenced the entire cantonal productive fabric in a structurally downwards manner. In short, the phenomenon would now be rooted in the ‘economic machine’ of the Canton, even beyond the role of cross-border workers, although certainly not erasable.
It should also be noted that the study compares wages of homogeneous economic structures between cantons, rather than regions. This is to overcome the obvious disadvantage that Ticino would have in a regional comparison. It thus emerges that the particular economic structure of Ticino does not have as important a role as previously thought. As Maurizio Bigotta, head of the Economy sector for the cantonal statistics office, explains: “The gap, despite the different economic structure and the presence of different workers, does not change that much. Overall, it goes from 23% to 20%, so it drops a bit but not as significantly as one would have expected.”
