Why Italy's Demographic Crisis is Getting Worse 

Answers: 1) households need 2 working parents (no time for raising kids) 2) High rent costs 3) Even higher property and mortgage costs 4) stagnant wages 5) bad work conditions for parents (flexibility and home office are rare on job market) 6) often high child care costs You can’t have kids when you give away at least 50-80% of salary to landlords. You can’t have kid’s when you work all day (what’s the point?). You can’t have kids when you are not sure if next month you will still have a job… Older people as well as governments need to get real. Millennials have to be literally millionaires to own a house… This economic situation is outrageous.

She still could have a few kids. But to solve Italy's demographic problem all by herself seems to be a stretch.

Same problem in Spain. My father had a normal job and could afford to buy a house a car keep 3 children and save money. Now my wife and I work. I have a manager position. And we get much less money than my father and everything is getting crazy expensive. Here the richer are richer and the middle class is more poor every year. Its more money than before but less people have it.

I'm 32, single, renting a studio apartment as this is the most I can afford. I work at an international company, full time, and earn above average. There is no way I will EVER be able to buy a decent appartment since a huge chunk of my salary goes to my landlord. How am I supposed to raise children if there is no chance to own even a smaller home, ever? Not to talk about other basic expenses like food, etc. Life in general is just too unaffordable for the average people.

I love how governments will do absolutely everything but tackle the actual problems causing the demographic crisis

Why is this called a fertility crisis, it has less to do with actual fertility. This has more to do with cost of living crisis putting people off having children. We are all locked into a financial system that has even put reproducing out of reach of most people. Housing and energy costs are far too high compared to wages in many Western countries. Employment is very insecure along with huge cut backs to the state putting help for parents at the back of priorities. A population full of old people and no children is a very sad population indeed.

In this situation a couple can hustle to exhaustion and still not be able to afford or to provide for the family, it's high time we start to invest in our future, and not listen to what the government or the media say.

How about instead of "tax the young workers!", we properly tax the corporate/wealthy evaders.

This isnt an italian problem, but rather a global wage problem. Many developed nations are facing the same issues with the same causes : everything essential to living is becoming too expensive for younger generations and work/ education demands are at an all time high. Nobody has time and money for kids. Other countries affected are: Germany, Spain, Japan, China ( yes really), south korea, greece, portugal, taiwan.

Millennials and Gen-z can barely afford rent, what makes you think they can afford children?

Italian here. There is no such thing as "making kids" where work isn't paid a living wage and work contracts may or may not be renewed every 6 months.

Instead of taxing workers , why not tax the super-rich ?

25 years old italian with a somewhat good paying job here, Meloni's plan isn't working and it will just get worse, let me explain: 1) As someone else already said here, these policies only address the symptoms of the crisis and not the root cause. 2) Single handedly the BIGGEST and MAIN problem, is, you guess it, the HOUSING-CRISIS. Even with a decent paying job (And salaries haven't grown for 30 years, the worst data in the EU) you can't afford to live on your own/with your spouse, it's just financially impossible, let alone with a children. What people do, including myself, is stacking up on money waiting the right moment to get out of home.

Remember when they used to say technology will make productivity increase to a point where we won't need many workers?

Giorgia Meloni has only one child. She has sacrificed motherhood to pursue a career, now she is trying to convince other women not to do as she. Total waste of time.

As an italian I can say it's only a money factor, children cost too much for a young italian. Also there is the possibility that in case of divorce (which is like 50% ish) a man would be literally drained all of his wealth to pay for the other side of the family. So it's just better to not have kids.

when you have to stay in line to get a loan for 30 years to pay for a crappy apartment and be at the mercy of a employer to keep a steady income so you don't loose the apparent.. how in the world they think people want to have babies? is that complicated? make housing f***ing affordable.. how you expect people to work 8h/day if they cannot afford to have a house?

Could you imagine being offered 50-175 euros to have a baby, when the average cost to raise a child is well over 150,000 euros?

43yo italian here. I have a university degree and start my business 12 years ago full of dreams. I simply cannot grow the business. Covid makes me go back in time around 8 years. Now taxation is out of control, If the income grows, also the taxes and business cost grow, making everything pointless. Too much regulations makes the work difficult. In 12 years I could not acquire any personal assets, only a 30year mortgage. I will definitely not have kids under this situation and I am seriously thinking of leaving the country soon.

Bruh just make those old people work

A lot of those "natalist" policies seem to miss half the point. Before even thinking to have babies and benefit from these schemes, people in their late 20s need to have a stable financial situation -- ie an "indeterminato" (a permanent work contract) and a home, ideally by their mid-20s. But 20-something Italians living in Italy can hardly dream of that. They typically live at their parents' and work successions of internships and low-pay short-term contracts. No VAT cuts on diapers is going to make them more likely to have babies. To start tackling the heart of the matter, you'd have to introduce schemes that make it easier for young people to find a stable job and have their own home (eg tax cuts for companies with enough under-30 year-old permanent workers / tax increases for companies that don't do that). Alternatively (or additionally), Italy will have to raise its legal immigration rate, at least a little bit. But this doesn't look like a very trendy solution in Italian politics at the moment, to say the least. EDIT: to make it clear, I'm not necessarily advocating for more government handouts here. Tax cuts for companies that have more 20-somethings with permanent contracts could very well be financed by tax increases on companies that don't. And that's just one example. I don't have the pretense to know which scheme would work best. All I'm saying is this is a crucial part of the natality problem, and yet it doesn't seem to be taken into the equation.

When you pay people peanuts, they can’t move out of their parent’s apartment, where you can hear neighbors fart. It doesn’t take a lot of analysis to fix the problem. Pay people living wages.

Very simple, it what happens when 98% of the pizza is held by 1% of the people and then they give those people scraps to fight over

Curious that Italy gets most of the press on this issue but that the exact same dynamic is playing itself out in Spain as well.

Governments doing everything but building more affordable homes because they themselves own a lot of property's and dont want the housing market to come down to realistic prices.

These solutions address the symptoms and not the underlying problems as they don't incentivise BECOMING parents. People who are already parents aren't the one who are going to push fertility rates above what they already are, as they are already parents. The issue is helping or alleviating concerns that would-be parents have: job security. If I know I'll be able to raise children in a stable economic environment in which I can earn more money, then I'm more likely to consider it. My partner and I are on an indefinite hold to have children (we live in Italy) as there's just too much uncertainty. I also think giving parents money "per-child" incentivises childbirth for the wrong reasons. We've seen this in countries like Poland and the UK where people will just have children to receive benefits and not actually raise a stable and productive family founded on love.

Wealth and resources are finite. The 1 percent hoards their wealth and bosses get the profits instead of them being evenly distributed among the employees/workers. Its like having 8 slices of pizza and having one person taking the whole thing instead of letting each person get a slice.

everyone is telling women to be independent and get a carreer, that also doesnt help. so we get as much people here from outside europe, and that causes even more problems.

The three big problems from my perspective: 1). Job insecurity. A lot of entry-level jobs offer contracts for only one to two years. This isn’t long enough to plan for a family. Hell, it’s barely long enough to meet a partner, if you don’t already have one. 2). Location insecurity. Today, it’s very common for young workers to change cities for both education and professional reasons. This prevents the long-term stability necessary for planning a family. 3). Housing insecurity. In major metropolitan areas, which is where most desirable jobs concentrate, housing prices have grown far faster than wages. This means that “younger” workers continue to rent well past the age when their parents had placed down payments on a house or condominium. This is linked to income and wealth inequality. Income: as the highest-paid workers continue to see their incomes grow, they outbid younger workers for the limited real estate available in a city. Wealth: those who own a house seek to keep the value of that commodity high, and thus oppose any measure which could reduce prices. Since the highest-paid and wealthiest persons in a community tend to be older, these two tendencies effectively price younger workers out of the market.

I just had my first kid and am a millenial, not that old. My company just announced they will give fathers 18 weeks full (or 36 weeks half) paid leave per child, on top of 20-26 weeks paid parental leave from the government (shared with the other parent) that can be taken over a 2 year period after the birth of each child. Theres even a childrens room on site, and considering there are laboratories etc thats pretty amazing. People I work with have 2+ kids on average and theres a massive culture of hanging out with the kids. Im looking forward to having more kids! This is in Australia btw

Asking feminists and boomers how to solve the birth rate problem. Is like asking the homeless for financial advice. You’re just going to get bullshit answers.

True. Meloni can't solve the Italian demographic crisis single-handedly. She answers to an electorate, to political parties and probably to several business interests. The policies described in this video are typical for developed countries facing declining population and, as in other countries, won't work. In Australia, professional training has become more and more arduous over the last couple of decades, so most people with degrees aren't fully qualified until they're in their late 30s or early 40s, which is growing quite late for women to have babies. Besides, after sacrificing the best decades of their lives, many people want to finally have some holidays and do some fun things, rather than just raise kids. Furthermore, in Australia, government policies over the last 30 years have lead to housing becoming very difficult to afford ( through rapidly rising house prices, strong inflation and stagnant wages). When people can't afford a decent family home, they're far less likely to choose to start a family. Simply throwing dollars at this problem doesn't work. It requires the far more difficult task of challenging some very powerful interest groups and entrenched practices. It involves societal change. I suspect that Australia will fail to increase births but will compensate through immigration and raising the retirement age (both of which are contentious).

Every Government: Hey tell us what you need to maintain the population Society: hey things are getting very expensive to raise a family Government: Surprised Pikachu face Society: Surprised Pikachu face Government: please ask something easier like national smile campaign bcos smiling makes you happier naturally and we encourage everyone to smile more

None of this measures treats one big part of the problem. Italian stay longer and longer at their parents' home because they cannot afford to move out. And almost nobody have a child while living with their parent.

One solution is we need to build large, multiple bedroom apartments for families. They had them in the old days.

I live and work in Italy and not a day passes by without questioning whether I should stay or leave. I feel like I'm working just to get by paying rent and utilities. What's worse is that government policies do not really favor "side hustles"... Can't even imagine having a kid through all this fiscal pressure.

€50 to have a baby is a better joke than even a comedian could write

In 12 years of working in Milan I was surprised at how many of my male colleagues in their early thirties were going in for fertility treatments to have a baby. None of them went for a second child and I don't think that financial incentives would have worked to induce them to go through that stress a second time.

Those policies don't even approach what we have in Australia so they are pathetic. Seriously a few hundred Euro for an 18 year commitment. Get real

Can't have kids when the cost of living is too high. 🤷‍♂️

Young couples who want families can't pay rent prices and are unable to save for their own property. Nobody wants the shame of condemning their child to such an existence, born into servitude to pay landlords.

This is what happens when you cater to corporations rather than people lol

The non-PC way to fix this problem is to treat retirement as a luxury rather than a right. The elderly either work until they die, live in multigenerational housing while caring for their grandkids/great-grandkids or spend their golden years in state-owned senior living facilities if they have nowhere else to go.

the idea that people are just not having enough sex and the government has to step in is undeniably funny

Politicians are really idiots. You need to provide cheap housing forever for couple to consider a family! That's it!

As an Italian, our basic weight for unskilled normal job (I remind you in case you forgot or you didn’t know this, Italy is specialist in low skilled low paid jobs) is around 1000-1200 euros per month. I also add that since these are low skilled jobs, there is no competition because literally anyone can do that job, so this leads to workers who think they are “blessed because they got a minimum paid job with no future, no carrier and mostly without even a contract that lasts more than 6 months” A basic renting outside a big city is minimum 400-500 euros per month, without counting energy and any tax this country has. So people just stay at parents home because it’s the only way to live a decent life without having to “work to survive” and there is no fix to this because this country, sadly, is a failed country. Meloni is the best rappresentative for a failed country that prefers to blame Europe or literally anyone else, instead of just making some self criticism. Also let’s not forget a lot of young Italians escape from this country, and they are totally right. I’m studying too for escape Italy because I had really enough of this country 😂

Me and my friends would have some kids if it made financial sense but man, it just isn't doable unless you're a doctor

Most people have done their sums and realise that looking after themselves is hard enough without thinking about children. Economic policies have been ok for employers but for most employees its struggle street. Life is stressful where the future for most people is not very ‘attractive’.

The only solution would be a massive housing program to get Italian young adults an own appartement and not letting them stay with their parents until 35 or 40 years old.

I will not have kids until it is affordable for one parent to stay home for 18 years. It is that simple.

In Italy they don’t have minimum wages and barely give permanent work contracts. The bureaucracy makes starting a legitimate business impossible. Then the Italians that want more pay leave.

No money? No food? Just have more babies. Fixed.

Give young people chance to live as people. Solved.

Telling Everyone to wait until you are 40+ to have kids is a bad idea ? Who’d of known

High unemployment for young people, expensive cities…difficult to tackle these problems

The funny thing is that in my country , in my teenage years (2000s) Italy had a "dream land" reputation. Seems like its rotting heavily by now... :(

Isn't it weird that Meloni talking about christian families while she's the one who doesn't even bothered to marry her child's father? 😏

If housing rent did not take 1/2 of take home pay. Maybe there would be more kids

Not Italian but from a different European country and I am in my late twenties unable to afford a home. Not even a mortgage, I can barely rent. My income is too high for social housing but not enough to pay 1300 a month for a small studio. Why in the world would I have a child under these circumstances? Anyways in my country I’ve met a lot of Italians that moved here because they couldn’t find jobs in Italy so it must be even worse there

In my opinion, the key problem are the prevalence of short term work contracts. You just cannot plan a family or get access to loans without longterm employment stability. It has been a problem for quite a while but due to generational egoism (the older generations benefit from legacy stable and well paid working contracts) has never been tackled

They cannot afford children ,also political instability creates fear for the future.

What puzzles me is that in spite of this "crisis", Italy still has one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU, particularly among youngest workers. That says there isn't a real shortage of potentially productive workers.

In order to have a family, you need to settle down. In order to settle down, you need to have a home. It's as simple as that. Fight against landlords and real estate monopolies. Slash housing prices. Make housing affordable again. Do that, and I *guarantee* a spike in birthrates.

With how expensive everything is and how difficult dating is, I'm not the least bit surprised.

As an Italian Meloni just didn't think about that kids are really, REALLY, expensive and we just can't afford them. Until the wages rise we italians can't have children AND have a decent life. Moreover parents need a good work-life balance to manage a child and work. We just can't have this right now. We work a lot of hours for such low wage compared to the rest of Europe and compared to the cost of living. We young people also don't want to have childern, we already have a lot of mental health problems to deal with

Fertility is directly correlated to overall wellbeing. That simple.

Not just Italy, all over Europe.

When large population of women in a country are to old to have children...You can do all the laws its to late and in the future its will be worse ..

The solution could be to reduce the amount of hours worked (thus increasing the time that could be spent raising kids and decreasing the stress associated with work) per week, increase buying power (lessening the economic burden of having kids), improve the housing situation by adding price limits on rent and mortgage, taxing the rich to a higher degree to improve the quality of public services and add a minimum wage

The thumbnail killed me hahahahhaha

the new TLDR studio set up looks so good!!

How ironic that Giorgia Meloni has only one child herself. And when you pay people to have children, guess who will have them? Poorer people who are not in the best situation to provide.

We've kinda sacrificed everything on the altar of economic growth. There's just no incentive to have children unless you really really like them. They're bloody expensive and labour intensive. Many of my friends just aren't interested in completely changing their lifestyle, and paying out the nose for the privilege. They get pets instead when they want something cute to care for. In this environment, if you want a steady supply of future tax payers then you better be willing to pay a lot for them. Perhaps to the point that parenting becomes modestly profitable. Because I don't see wages ever outpacing cost of living for the living standard people expect. We won't go back to cramming large families into dank single room apartments.

Homo sapiens lived in tribes where children were raised communally. Only in urban industrial is responsibility for a child entirely individual. Family is not enough. Only when child raising is entirely funded by the society at large is population growth feasible at scale.

A large portion of the cause in my opinion is the cost of housing & life in general. Additionally society is poorly structured for children - couples both need to work and pay for expensive day care. This is madness. Day care should be free or women / men should be compensated well for several years after having a child monetarily / and with time to raise the child. Instead countries across europe (like the Netherland where i live) ignore the issue and import more people from abroad to plug the fiscal gap, meanwhile the problem just gets worse.

Will having more people keep the cost of living down? On the other hand, decrease in population should alleviate the housing crisis as more people are dying off.

it's very simple , no one could afford anything, let alone a family , those corporate policies and low pay are killing europe.

In Europe, there's a growing sense of neglect towards the younger generation. They face lower salaries, longer work hours, and increased responsibilities while witnessing a surge in billionaires. The housing market adds to their woes, as property prices soar, making it difficult to afford homes, let alone start families. To compensate, cheap labor from abroad is often favored, leading to frustration among the youth, who feel betrayed. It's high time politicians acknowledge and tackle these pressing concerns rather than resorting to distractions. The younger generation deserves meaningful change.

higher taxes also increases financial strain, causing me to think "i cant afford children". Its kind of like deflation, where I hold on to the idea of children (similar to holding on to my money). Like many others pointed out the real issue is financial stability. I would love to have children, but how do I finance them? I don't need the gov to finance everything, just help me get a stable and future proof job?

The problem is that it is too expensive to grow a child in europe.Also no affordable housing.Almost no available property to rent and extremely expensive. We can’t afford to have a baby as money is not enough.Only one parent working as baby sitter is not affordable.Even for a couple without children is very difficult to survive.

Sweden actually did solve this issue - temporarily for a few decades atleast, in the 1920s. They did a study on why the birth rate got so low and then implemented solutions to it. Some if it includes a monthly sum for each child but the big one was building many large houses where families could live. That's a key point. Many today assume it's impossible to get a higher fertiltiy rate but it has been done before and it can be done again.

When youth unenployment is over 30% it is kind of hard for people to want/have children

I hate to say it, but a good part of the housing problem is that people are living so much longer. People live into their 90s on average. In the past, someone would die in their mid 70's and their apartment would then be rented to a couple in their 20's...now that apartment is taken by the person who lives until 96...Everyone wants to stay healthy, go to the Dr, get pills to aleviate everything, so they live to their 90's.

I am a Mexican, and I love Italy, I hope I can visit Italy. I love Italian culture, Italy has given so much to the world.

Summary of this video 1. Italy is facing one of the worst demographic crises globally, marked by the lowest fertility rate in Europe. 2. Prime Minister Georgia Maloney came to power with the explicit promise to end Italy's demographic winter. 3. Low fertility rates, below the replacement rate of 2.1, create economic and political stress due to a smaller, older population. 4. Italy's population has been aging since the 70s and actively shrinking since 2014, putting immense strain on public finances. 5. Italy's fertility rate dropped below replacement as early as 1976 and reached an astonishing low of 1.18 in 1995. 6. In 2022, fewer than 400,000 babies were born, the lowest number since unification in 1861, implying a birth rate of about 1.2. 7. Italy's population is old and shrinking, with projections estimating a drop to 52 million by 2050 and under 50 million by 2070. 8. Italy has the highest old age dependency ratio in the EU, creating significant strain on the national budget. 9. Italy's debt-to-GDP ratio is above 130%, and borrowing costs are high, limiting future borrowing capacity. 10. Maloney has implemented pro-child policies to address the fertility crisis, including financial incentives for families and tax cuts on child benefits. 11. These policies include a scheme providing families with 50-175 euros per newborn child and reduced VAT on baby products. 12. Maloney aims to spend 4 billion EUR from the EU CoRecovery Fund on new childcare facilities with places for over 250,000 people. 13. Despite these policies, Italy saw fewer births in 2022 than ever before, and provisional data for 2023 suggests a further decline. 14. The effectiveness of pronatalist policies in other countries, such as China, Singapore, and Japan, has also been limited. 15. The complexity of Italy's demographic decline and the economic challenges it poses raise doubts about the effectiveness of current policies in reversing the trend.

Late stage capilism is a factor too. No parent wants to have a child to lighten demographic burdens. Parents have kids when they can believe that child has a legitimate chance for a happy future. That's not how many people see the present or near future. Governments emphasize corporations, large campaign donors etc. over individual families.

Ah yes, the only solution is to increase tax on work because tax on capital is unthinkable am I right?

As a 60 year old American, the high cost of goods and services is out of control. I am a father of 3 children. Yes, raising kids is expensive, but the blessings they provide are priceless.

Choosing not to have children is preferable to importing individuals with undesirable qualities, as seen in the situation in Sweden.

Well, even if you can afford renting a house and have a decent job, that doesn't automatically imply that people would want to build a relationship with you, create a family and have kids. There are obstacles on so many levels.

I'm what you called an 'idle pensioner', something I resent as I worked for 53yrs. I think I'm entitled to my pension as I paid in all those 53yrs.

This is so sad. And The Silence of politicians is outrageous

I'd add that Meloni's party opposes the introduction of minumum wage, which could help everyone but especially young people to have a stabler income, many temporary jobs offer ridiculous paychecks that only slow young adults from becoming independent. Asking for a mortgage in Italy as a

Maybe if the rich in Italy would stop offshoring industries, payed decent stable wages so that workmen and the educated would remain or offer affordable rent/houses/daycare... couples could actually have the incentive to have children. Perhaps we could also mention their obsession with pricey bureaucracy, so that everyone who works in government gets their fat cut from those trying to actually create or improve something before they can ever start.

2 children = A New Home Can guarantee that will work

Maybe if the Italian government got a higher paying job, didn't eat out as much and didn't spend money on coffee and avocado toast, they could afford nice things like a high birth rate. :)

What more is that young people I met are not interested in discussing important topics like these. Every time I raised the issues like the low fertility rate and the low involvement of young people in politics compared to other countries in the EU they just show indifference. As an Italian this makes me really sad.

She only has 1 child, so not exactly leading by example...

I don't see this as "getting worse" since low fertility (even by European standards) was something that Italy had and knew about for some time.

If we are talking about fertility rates and population crisis, Bulgaria is the best and prime example of this being an issue. Ageing population, massive emigration, poverty, corruption, no stable government etc.