Sardinia's economy is holding up, but talent is fleeing: nearly 10,000 young people have left in two years.
The 2025 Svimez report: regional GDP, while slowing, remains positive. Employment is growing. However, the island remains trapped by a declining birth rate and recent graduates fleeing.
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Sardinia's economy is slowing, but it's weathering the crisis, tariffs, and other economic and financial upheavals. What's increasingly concerning, however, is the constant and nearly unstoppable drain of young talent.
This is what the new report by the agency for the development of Southern Italy, Svimez , highlights, just presented.
As mentioned, the island is not slowing down: between 2021 and 2024, the regional gross domestic product recorded an overall increase of +8.4% , even though the island's economy is indeed slowing. While in 2021, the regional GDP grew by 8.5%, in 2022 it fell to +6.2%, in 2023 to 1.1%, and last year to 0.9%.
The best performances – the report emphasizes – are above all those of industry and construction . Agriculture also apparently performed well (4.8%), but it had to deal with an 11.1% drop in employment.
Employment in Sardinia is increasing overall (+5.1%) , but, as mentioned, the alarm is particularly strong among young people: the youth unemployment rate on the island in 2024 was in fact 23%, while between 2022 and 2024, 9,491 people in the 25-34 age group left Sardinia, of which 5,164 to move to the Centre-North and 4,327 to move abroad.
These numbers are even more alarming when combined with the total number of emigrants from the island between 2005 and 2024 (20,000 people) and the declining birth rate and population, which last year alone amounted to 9,152 units.
Svimez's comment on the phenomenon leaves no doubt: Sardinia, along with Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, Molise, and Sicily , is a "trapped region" because "the decline in the active population is accentuated, the percentage of graduates is significantly lower than the European average, and youth migration is now a consolidated trend , confirming the persistent structural fragility of the South."
The report highlights that GDP is holding steady or growing and employment is increasing, counterbalanced by the flight of young people and talent, which characterizes all the territories of the South and the Islands.
Here too, the data speaks for itself: Southern Italy's gross domestic product has seen a remarkable leap in recent years, rising 8.5% compared to 5.8% in Central and Northern Italy. These nearly record-breaking numbers, however, are tempered by the 175,000 people, mostly young people, who have left the South and the Islands to move to the North or abroad.
"To retain young people," concludes the Svimez report, "the South must activate knowledge-intensive production chains, strengthen its innovative industrial base, and integrate higher education, research, and industrial policies. Without a qualitative leap in the demand for skills, youth mobility will continue to be a forced option."
