Worse than us, Greece. Meager, very meager consolation to be penultimate in Europe. Italy is the second country with the lowest employment rate, with as much as 10 percentage points below the average. It is also the country with the greatest regional employment differences, further exacerbated by gender disparity. And Sardinia? It could only be part of the lower part of the ranking of regions.

Italy is bad in Europe

A useful indicator to understand the employment situation of a population is precisely the employment rate which allows us to quantify the portion of the population that is actually doing a job. “With an unemployment rate of 9.4% in 2020, our country is not particularly far from the European average of 7.2%. At the same time, however, it is second to last in all of Europe for the employment rate, followed only by Greece. In 2020, less than 60% of the working-age population was employed, moreover with a slight worsening compared to 2019, probably due to the pandemic ", underlined the Openpolis experts in the study carried out recently on this topic. Exactly 58.4% of the Italian population of working age, in 2020, had a job; 1.1 percentage points lower than the 2019 rate.

"In terms of national employment rate, Italy ranks below most of the southern European countries and also quite far from Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, where working conditions are also often difficult », Specify from the Foundation. First in Europe the Netherlands with 77.8% of employed persons of working age (between 15 and 64 years), followed by Germany with 76.2 and Sweden 75.5%. Just above Italy, Ireland and Spain with 60.9%.

The Sardinia drama

«By examining the data at the local level, we also see that there are strong differences not only between the various states of Europe, but also between the regions within them. However, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily are the only European regions in which less than 50% of the population of working age is employed ”, underlines Openpolis. In 2020 the employment rate in Sardinia was 52.1%; in all of Europe worse than the island only in those three Italian regions.

Sardinian numbers

“As far as the Italian regions are concerned, in first place we find the autonomous province of Bolzano, which has an employment rate of over 70%, at the levels of many regions of northern Europe. Compared to Campania, there is a difference of 30 percentage points, and this makes Italy the most heterogeneous country in terms of employment rate. Other countries, in particular Spain and Greece, are also characterized by strong internal diversification, ”the experts write. At the national level "The Italian macro-region of the north-east is the one with the highest employment rate (67.5%), followed by the north-west (65.9%), the center (62.7%), and , at a greater distance, from the south (44.6%) and the islands (43.7%) ». So between Sardinia and the first, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, there are a good 20 percentage points of difference.

"As in the rest of the continent, then, also in Italy the pandemic has had an impact on the world of work. Compared to 2019, our country's employment rate has decreased by about one percentage point. With the exception of Friuli Venezia Giulia, all Italian regions, albeit with slight differences, have registered decreases. A setback for our country, which in recent years has been recording a slow but steady improvement ”, reads the report.

Gender inequality

But there are also other disparities that characterize Italy. Like those related to educational qualifications. As Istat data show, there is a significant difference between graduates (employed, in 2020, almost 80%) on the one hand and people without a qualification, or with an elementary school certificate (31.5%) on the other. And there are also considerable gender differences: compared to men, women are less integrated into the world of work. So much so that there are 18 percentage points of difference between the male employment rate (67.2%) and the female one (49%). «Also in this case, we see that the gaps become more or less wide according to the region. The gender gap, for example, is more significant in the southern regions than in the northern ones, and Puglia is the region where the disparity is more evident », they say from Openpolis. therefore Puglia has an employment gap of 26.9% (male 59.7%; female 32.8%).

These data are useful for understanding the situation in Sardinia, which ranks in the middle of the rankings among the regions with a gap of 13.9% (male 59%; female 45.1%). Valle d'Aosta comes first with 7.6 points of difference between the percentage of employed men (71%) and women (63.4%).

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