Sardinia faces a depopulation crisis: nearly €2 billion in production capacity lost in twenty years.
The island has the lowest birth rate in Europe, with the share of citizens aged 15-64 falling by seven percentage points from 2005 to 2025.(L'Unione Sarda archive)
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Sardinia's demographic crisis is no longer just a prospect to be contained, but a real and current economic and production emergency .
This is what emerges from the new report by the Confindustria Sardegna Research Centre , entitled " The Cost of Depopulation: Demography and Production Capacity in Sardinia ", which illustrates the negative dynamics gripping the island and economically quantifies the impact of the demographic decline on the region's production capacity.
According to the study, Sardinia is in a more critical situation not only than the rest of Italy, but also than the entire European Union. In 2024, the average number of children per woman fell to 0.91, the lowest in the entire European continent (exceeded only by the Canary Islands) among the European Union territories. The birth rate is also the lowest in Europe, at 4.5 births per thousand residents, while the share of the population aged 65 and over has now reached 27.4%.
At the same time, residents between 0 and 14 years old represent just 9.7% of the population . Not surprisingly, the average age of residents, at 51.7, is also close to yet another European record low for the island.
THE COST – What the report highlights above all, however, is the shrinking working-age population. In 2005, Sardinian residents between the ages of 15 and 64 represented 69.6% of the population. Twenty years later, in 2025, this share had fallen to 62.8%. With the same overall population, if Sardinia had maintained the demographic structure of 2005, it would today have over 106,000 more working-age residents. The Research Center transformed this demographic gap into an economic estimate, applying the employment rate and value added per worker to individual municipalities. The result is a potential loss of 44,238 employed people and approximately €1.705 billion in productive capacity .
"The loss of residents isn't just a statistical issue: we're losing young people, families, jobs, and productive capacity," says Andrea Porcu, director of the Confindustria Sardegna Research Center . "Even if we weren't at the bottom of the European demographic rankings, the situation would still be problematic due to our insularity, which would make managing the problem complex. But with these numbers, the picture is truly disheartening. Demography isn't an external variable to economic development, but a fundamental determinant . Businesses and institutions must collaborate to build an environment that can retain young people, but also attract workers, students, and entrepreneurs from abroad ."
SMALL MUNICIPALITIES – In Sardinia, the situation in small municipalities is particularly critical . In towns with up to 1,000 inhabitants , the average age is more than three years higher than in urban centers. This phenomenon not only concerns school closures or reduced services, but directly affects the ability of these areas to attract families, workers, and businesses, in areas already structurally marginalized and at risk of economic and social desertification.
(Unioneonline/vl)