MILAN – The aging of Italy opens a chasm on several levels which invades the availability of the workforce and puts further pressure on our health, social security and social assistance systems.
Lastly was the governor of Bank of Italy, Fabio Panettaunderlined the urgency of the problem by dedicating a heartfelt passage to it in his Final Considerations: the demographic decline “is slowing down Italy’s growth” and between now and 2040 could lead to a contraction of national wealth by as much as 13 points. The recipe is as well known as it is complex to implement: “The Italian economy will be able to achieve sustained rates of development if it is able, on the one hand, to deal with the consequences of the decline and aging of the population and, on the other hand, to impart a decisive acceleration to productivity”, recalled Panetta.
The Istat numbers recalled by Palazzo Koch say that by 2040 we will have 5.4 million fewer people of working age, despite a net flow from abroad of 170 thousand people per year. The exit of the baby boomers towards retirement becomes a drama for the country system.
The fact is that, as underlined by a research note from the economic consultancy and analysis company Prometheiaconsidering our low employment rate (if we rose to the European average level we would have 3.3 million more potential workers), the pool of 2 million unemployed and our NEETs – young people who neither study nor work – we could have an easy time fill the gap that the registry places before our eyes.
There is one thing, however: if the information we have on labor shortages, increase in vacancies and surveys on companies complaining of difficulty in hiring are true, then the misalignment (the famous “mismatch”) between job supply and demand is so intense that the patch (unemployed, inactive and so on) will not be able to cover the gap in the workforce.
Looking more closely at this mismatch can help you avoid the cliff. First of all, says Prometeia, this misalignment is found in the different level of education of those leaving and entering work. Basically, those who leave have less education than those who enter: in 2023, for example, there was a surplus of workers with a high level of education and a deficit of 80 thousand people with ‘basic’ education.
There is therefore a problem at the base of the pyramid. But at the top things are even worse. Although the demand for highly educated workers represents only 14% of the total, employers find it very difficult to find them. By cross-referencing Almalaurea and Unioncamere-Anpal data, Prometeia shows how the planned demand for a certain type of profiles does not correspond to the distribution of new graduates.
In 2022, for example, out of 281 thousand new graduates (almost six out of ten women), the courses that dominated were Engineering and architecture (15% of all new graduates), then economics and medicine/pharmacy (14% ). But if you look at the graph, in which the blue bar shows the demand for workers and the green the fields of specialization, it clearly emerges how many engage in studies “not requested” by the market.
The same can be said of the large pool of unemployed who theoretically should be the first to respond to companies’ demand for work. Even in this case, in fact, those with a degree and without work most of the time have a specialization in fields in which new graduates are more than sufficient to cover the need for professionalism. And the refrain does not change if the geographical variable is analyzed: potentially available workers are not located in areas with difficult-to-fill positions. “This suggests the need for incentives to convince these available workers to move to areas where there is demand for workers – especially of certain types – and for companies to move production to where available labor is relatively abundant,” he says Prometheia.
In conclusion, the analysis shows how the Italian labor market sees unsatisfied demand for both low- and high-educated workers. If in the first case this is probably due to the sudden increase in demand for these types of workers (for demographic reasons and the sectoral concentration of demand), on the other hand the misalignment between the specialization on the counters and the requests of the companies weighs heavily. The paradox is that the workers would be there, “but their level of education and skills and their geographical distribution (with a concentration in Southern Italy) mean that they are unable to satisfy existing demand”.
Clearly the analysis calls into question the education system, but also the active policies for the updating of the unemployed. With a note: women. Almost 70% of unemployed people with higher education are women. And given that graduates are precisely those most sought after by companies, the imbalance in our labor market weighs especially on their shoulders.
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