Wages, education, and human capital. Italy is falling behind the rest of the EU on key economic and social indicators . The result is a somewhat faded Tricolore.
At the top of the list of emergencies are wages. Italian wages are second-rate. This is demonstrated by figures from Eurostat , the statistical office of the European Union. The average for the 27 member states is €38,950 per year. Our country is in the €20,000 to €30,000 range .
Now, the fact that Luxembourg , with its 690,315 inhabitants and 125 licensed banks, has salaries of 88,000 euros is not indicative of anything; this is a case in itself. But Austria is at 73,000 euros, the Netherlands at 67,000, Germany at 64,000, France at 60,000. The decline has been dragging on, inexorably worsening, for the last twenty years: in 2004, Italy exceeded the EU average with a per capita GDP of 24,200 euros, compared to 21,300 euros in the rest of the Old Continent. Now, however, the same EU figure has reached 41,600 euros, compared to 39,900 in Italy. Translated into purchasing power, salaries from Aosta to Canicattì have collapsed. In 2022 alone, they lost 7.3 percent . A massive crisis, with a trend that dates back to the 1990s. Except that in thirty years, the decline had stalled at 2.9 percent. Lately, it's been a veritable collapse, especially since real wages continue to rise in most European economies.
Italy, again looking at the European Union as a whole, is among the last countries in terms of the number of university graduates : in the 25-34 age bracket, the one used to measure university completion, only 31.1 percent of young people have a diploma. The same figure in Europe is 45 percent. It's true that Italy has a high number of graduates who have not completed their studies: 44 percent versus the EU average of 32.5 percent. Compared to the European context, this allows us to nibble a few points, but not enough to close the enormous gap. Furthermore, Italy is characterized by a : in the 18-25 age bracket of boys and girls don't even graduate, although this figure has improved in recent years.
