Italy is the oldest country in the European Union: in twenty years it has lost more than 3 million people in the younger segment of the population. And it's not just the fault of denatality. Poor job opportunities are driving young people to flee to northern Italy or abroad, further decreasing the proportion of residents. The circle gets more and more vicious if we enter the personal sphere: the brake on building a new family is precisely the lack of a stable job. This is the worrying portrait of the new adults at home, drawn jointly by the National Youth Council and the Italian Youth Agency through the report "Giovani 2024: Bilancio di una Generazione” (“Youth 2024: Stocktaking of a Generation”). The Skuola.net portal analyzed it, extrapolating the most interesting passages. In detail, between 2002 and 2023, the number of young Italian residents declined by 3.4 million. In the 15-35 age group, it went from 16.1 million to 12.7 million, thus suffering a loss of more than a fifth of people (-21.2%). The strongest compression was among females: -22.8%, compared with -19.7% among males, with a peak of -30% in the 25-35 age segment. There is a big problem even from a "repopulation" perspective. Numbers place us in last place in the European Union in terms of the incidence of young people in the total population: while in Italy they are 17.4% of the population, the EU average is 19.4%, with particularly large gaps compared to more virtuous countries such as Luxembourg (23.7%), Denmark (22.1%), the Netherlands (21.9%), and Sweden (21.7%).
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