Francesco Billari in the large interview: “It is difficult for a single measure against the birth ride to change everything in a short time”

The graphic representation of the population in Italy was rather a pyramid: many children, followed by adults and ultimately by a small number of elderly people. To look at the same display of Istat today, you can see the shape of a ship where The children are few In the light of more and more elderly people. The fall in births is a problem mainly For the society of the futureThat the percentage of the active population will see on the labor market, thinks more and more, as repeated by Francesco BillariProfessor of Demography and Rector of the Bocconi University of Milan A The big interviewThe event organized by Waded In Milanese University, every intervention in this area has very long response processes, which does not reconcile with the short times of politics.

For this reason, they are often themes that remain outside the public and political debate in Italy: “Some interventions, especially those with family and fertility, have an impact in the following decades, It is difficult to have one policy that changes birth in the space within a year. It is therefore a matter of A theme that pays little politically: Policy is by definition having a shorter time than that of demography “.

Together with him, in the panel “The world of tomorrow, with today’s data” Stefano Scarpetta, director of employment, work and social policy at the OECD since 2013, who underlines how demographic winter not only only our country is concerned, also intervened: “It’s not just an Italian phenomenon, but we think it’s in all OECD countries – it needs – However, it must be said that we can also consider it a positive figure: from 1950 to 2024 we earned more than 20 years of life expectancy at birth and there have been 70% in good health. The person who needs to be analyzed in detail concerns a different aspect. The 2025 was a crucial year: average in the OECD countries For the first time, the population of working age is no longer growing. This means that one of the growth of the company and the good engines will be a motor that will work less well “.

So if, as with Scarpetta figures, the same GDP with a third of the workforce will have to be produced, however, we will get the chance to improve those who have remained outside the labor market so far. This will be the real challenge: “Italy, for example, compared to other countries that are quickly outdated like ours, has an unspoken potential, that of unused talents. Nowadays, the female employment percentages are 17 percentage points lower than those of men and neets, who do not study and do not work, are always 15%”.

The concentration of policy to encourage the work world and to make it more accessible for these categories can make the difference. It cannot be ignored in this context The important contribution that foreigners can give. Forestry management of the tensile phenomenon will be fundamentally: “Our country has already changed – concludes Francesco Billari – LIn the Italian demographic ship it would be different if many foreigners had not arrived in recent decades And their children, besides the people who have become Italian. If we removed them from the graph, we would have a much older population and a smaller workforce. Immigration has already changed this country And it will continue to do this: the projections of the future not only depend on the birth rate and the lifespan, but also how we will behave compared to this and emigration of our young people “.