Italy's falling birth rate is a crisis that's only getting worse

Italian welfare systems are already struggling to cope with the ageing of the population, and there is no consensus on what to do about it.

Transcript

00:00Boosting the birth rate is not just an Italian problem but a Europe-wide issue.

00:07Italy has had some of the lowest birth rates in the EU,

00:10and the country is ageing at a much faster rate than other European countries.

00:14Addressing the crisis is one of the government's core policies,

00:17as well as a top priority of Brothers of Italy's EU agenda.

00:21A two-day conference held in Rome offered the chance to discuss

00:24what is being described as a cross-party national emergency.

00:28A brief interruption by a group of young activists

00:30who attacked the government's anti-abortion measures

00:33shows how very politically divisive the debate on this matter still is.

00:37Organisers stressed that a private institution was behind the event and not the government.

00:42It's a problem that doesn't affect one political component,

00:46one category of people, it affects everyone.

00:48That's why we insist on the cross-party issue.

00:50This is a matter of right, left, centre, white, black, green,

00:54immigrants, non-immigrants, elderly.

00:57Experts say that if the trend continues,

00:59Italy's population of 59 million could fall by almost 1 million in 2030.

01:04According to recent data released by the Italian National Statistics Office,

01:08the average number of children per woman has dropped from 1.24 in 2022 to 1.2 in 2023.

01:16An ageing population causes problems both to the pension and the health care systems.

01:21One of the peculiarities of our country is the persistence of this decline in birth rates.

01:28Since 2008, we have lost 200,000 births.

01:33Two-thirds are due to the lack of potential parents,

01:37precisely because they were not born 30 years ago.

01:41In 2023 alone, the government allocated around 1 billion euros

01:45for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work.

01:49It's a huge challenge.

01:50We are facing an epochal event for the entire Western world.

01:54We need to engage Europe,

01:56for example, to convene an intergovernmental conference between all the prime ministers.

02:00Opposition parties claim the government should do more to increase fertility rates,

02:05with experts saying that the latest budget doesn't include enough measures to tackle the problem.

02:11But many agree on one thing.

02:13In the last few decades, governments have failed to build a strategy

02:17to address Italy's demographic decline,

02:19or at least to prevent the country's birth rate from falling further.

02:24Giorgia Orlandi for Euronews in Rome.

02:30For more UN videos visit www.un.org