Birth rate: Sardinia is the region of Italy where there are fewer children, on average 0.95 per woman

Sardinia last Region of Italy for birth rate, the only one with a value lower than one child per woman (and for the third year in a row).

This is what emerges from the report with which Istat launches the alarm on the birth rate in Italy, which last year reached the lowest level ever recorded.

The Region with the highest fertility is Trentino Aldo Adige with 1.51 children per woman . Sicily and Campania follow with 1.35 and 1.33 respectively . In these three regions, mothers are on average younger than in the rest of the country, with an average age of childbirth between 31.4 in Sicily and 32.1 in Trentino.

Fertility in Molise and Basilicata is much more contained, 1.09 children per woman. But our Island stands out negatively above all, the only one below the unity with 0.95 children per woman: it is the third year in a row that Sardinia is the only Region with fertility below 1 .

National data

Birth rate at an all-time low nationwide with mortality still remaining high, according to the Istat demographic indexes for 2022: less than 7 newborns and more than 12 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants .

In 2022, births fell to 400 thousand units for the first time since the unification of Italy : they stand at 393 thousand. Since 2008, the last year in which there was an increase in births, the drop is around 184 thousand births, of which around 27 thousand concentrated from 2019 onwards.

This decrease is only partly due to the spontaneous or induced renunciation of having children by couples. In reality, the causes include both the decrease in size and the progressive aging of the female population in the ages conventionally considered reproductive (from 15 to 49 years) .

The resident population on January 1, 2023 is 58 million and 851 thousand people, 179 thousand less than the previous year (-3%) . A downward trend that began as early as 2014 and accelerated in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

Foreign citizens are increasing: they are 5 million and 50 thousand, 20 thousand more than the previous year .

And the ultra-centenarians are also growing, whose number has tripled in the last 20 years : on January 1, 2023 there are 22 thousand. Life expectancy at birth in our country is 82.6 years.

The aging process of the population continues, the average age of which rose between the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of 2023 from 45.7 to 46.4 years . The over-65s, who together number 14 million 177 thousand at the beginning of 2023, make up 24.1% of the total population, up from 23.8% last year.

(Unioneonline/L)