IN 2035 PENSIONERS WILL EXCEED WORKERS, PUTTING SOCIAL SECURITY AND HEALTH AT RISK
by Anna Messiah
Without corrective measures, if current demographic trends remain unchanged, in just 13 years, in 2035, the number of pensioners will exceed that of the employed for the first time, inevitably jeopardizing both the stability of the social security system and the health system in the light of the aging of the population. Numbers that emerged yesterday during the presentation of the 2022 edition of the Think Tank report “Welfare, Italy” supported by Unipol group with the collaboration of The European House – Ambrosetti which show a decidedly alarming picture: already in 2021, for the first time in history Italian, the number of births has fallen below the threshold of 400,000 and in 2050, according to the worst-case scenario, there will be a drop in the population of 10.5 million. A demographic imbalance “which affects the country and affects the present and future sustainability of the welfare model and in turn poses questions”, underlined the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, in his opening greeting of the event, recalling that the welfare system remains “a cornerstone of our model of coexistence”. Meanwhile, according to Think Tank estimates, in 2022 the expected welfare expenditure is 615 billion, up by 18 billion compared to last year and social security continues to absorb about half (48.4%), followed by health ( 21.8%), social policies (18.2%) and education (11.6%). What to do to reverse the trend and rebalance the accounts? We should integrate the theme of the birth rate within the European social taxonomy, suggest by «Welfare, Italy» but also promote measures aimed at supporting parenting in Italy which today has the European record for spending on the care of dependent children: on 27 % of household income is used to look after the children, against 25% in the UK, 15% in France and even 2% in Germany. “An issue, that of the birth rate and support for the family, which the government has among its priorities”, underlined Eugenia Roccella, minister for the family, the birth rate and equal opportunities, adding that “the 1.5 billion family in the Budget law, which we had to close in a short time and with limited resources, are only an advance of what the government will do to support the birth rate”. These are the last years “in which one can still hope to do something to reverse demographic trends, with the family that “today is fiscally abused”, added Roccella, announcing not only “financial support”, but also the will to “restoring social value to motherhood and parenthood”. In order to rebalance the Italian welfare system, it would then be useful to redefine the citizen’s income, given that today 56% of poor people do not actually have access to the subsidy and 1 recipient out of three is not actually poor, again suggested by «Welfare, Italy», where they also underline the need to enhance the contribution of supplementary pensions and corporate and contractual welfare. «We have many people who emigrate and don’t return, a topic to reflect on. We are a country with a high quality of life, we must also be a country with a high quality of work», concluded the president of Unipol, Carlo Cimbri. (All rights reserved)
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