ROME: Italy’s population is greying further amid falling birth rates, rising average life expectancy and people getting older, the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) said in its annual Noi Italia report Monday.
For every 100 people aged under 15 in the country, there are now 187 people aged 65 or above, the Italian news agency ANSA quoted the report.
The birth rate picked up a tad to 1.25 children per woman in 2021 after years of decline.
In other points, Istat said marriages and divorces were both up slightly in 2021, the last year for which figures are available.
The report also showed how in 2022 11.5 per cent of youngsters aged between 18 and 24 left their studies early, with the percentage rising to 15.1 per cent in Italian southern regions.
Meanwhile, Istat said that the employment rate among the 20-64 age group rose by 2.1 percentage points to reach 64.8 per cent in 2022 but that a strong gender bias remained.
Female employment stood at 55 per cent compared to 74.7 per cent for men.
Elsewhere in the report, Istat said Italians are among the most ‘motorised’ people in Europe with 675 cars per thousand inhabitants compared to the European Union (EU) average of just over 500.
On security, Istat said that in 2021, 58.8 per cent of women murder victims in Italy were killed by their intimate partner or former intimate partner.
In 25.2 per cent of cases, the murderer was another family member while in 5.0 per cent of cases the victim knew her murderer in another capacity.
Conversely, for men in 2021, only 4.3 per cent of murders took place within the context of a current (3.8 per cent) or past (0.5 per cent) intimate relationship.
In 16.8 per cent of cases the murderer was another family member, while in 43 per cent of cases, there was no relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. – BERNAMA-ANSA
