In the South, more pensions are paid than salaries, but within a few years the overtaking is destined to happen in the rest of the country as well. This is what emerges from an analysis carried out by the Cgia Research Office which processed data from INPS and ISTAT. The latest available data allow us to make a comparison between the number of employees and the number of pensions paid to Italians and refer to 2022. If at that time the number of employed workers and self-employed workers was close to 23.1 million, the checks paid to pensioners were just under 22.8 million (balance equal to +327 thousand). Cgia observes that the figures have certainly changed compared to 2022, in particular those referring to employed workers. In fact, the number of employees in Italy has increased and while waiting for INPS to update its statistics, it is equally reasonable to believe that the number of pensions paid in this last year and a half has also grown, even more than the increase in active workers. According to some forecasts, by 2028, 2.9 million Italians are expected to exit the labor market due to having reached the age limit, of which 2.1 million are currently employed in the central-northern regions.
A problem that does not only concern Italy; unfortunately, it affects all the main countries of the Western world. In the coming years the situation is expected to worsen significantly throughout the country, even in the most economically advanced areas. However, Already today there are 11 northern provinces that, like almost all southern ones, record a number of pensions paid out that is higher than the paychecks paid by entrepreneurs to their collaborators. They are: Sondrio (balance equal to -1,000), Gorizia (-2 thousand), Imperia (-4 thousand), La Spezia (-6 thousand), Vercelli (-8 thousand), Rovigo (-9 thousand), Savona (-12 thousand), Biella (-13 thousand), Alessandria (-13 thousand), Ferrara (-15 thousand) and Genoa (-20 thousand). All 4 provinces of Liguria present a result anticipated by the minus sign, while in Piedmont they are three out of eight. Of the 107 provinces of Italy monitored in this analysis by the Cgia Research Office, only 47 present a positive balance: the only territorial realities of the South that record a difference anticipated by the plus sign are Cagliari (+10 thousand) and Ragusa (+9 thousand). At a territorial level, the most virtuous reality in Italy is the Metropolitan City of Milan (difference between the number of pensions and employed equal to +342 thousand). Followed by Rome (+326 thousand), Brescia (+107 thousand), Bergamo (+90 thousand), Bolzano (+87 thousand), Verona (+86 thousand) and Florence (+77 thousand). Finally, among the provinces of the Center, the results of the Tuscan ones stand out: such as Prato (+33 thousand), Pisa (+14 thousand) and Pistoia (+6 thousand).
In short, the checks paid by INPS are destined to exceed the paychecks of workers and employees employed in factories and offices, even in the geographical areas of the Center and the North, thus putting at risk the economic sustainability of our health and social security system. From the analysis of the balance between the number of employed people and pensions paid in 2022, the most “unbalanced” province in Italy is Lecce: the difference is -97 thousand. Naples follows with -92 thousand, Messina with -87 thousand, Reggio Calabria with -85 thousand and Palermo with -74 thousand. It should be noted that the high number of checks paid in the South and the Islands is not attributable to the excessive presence of old-age/early pensions, but, instead, to the high diffusion of social or disability benefits. A worrying result that clearly demonstrates the effects caused in recent decades by four closely related phenomena: the low birth rate, the progressive aging of the population, an employment rate much lower than the EU average and the presence of too many irregular workers. The combination of these factors has progressively reduced the number of active contributors and, consequently, increased the number of welfare recipients. (ITALPRESS) – (CONTINUED).
