9.4% of the population lives in absolute poverty: this is two million families and 5.6 million people. Including 1.3 million minors: an unprecedented figure, since – in 2005 – Istat began to survey the historical series on poverty. The drama recorded in the last year is accentuated by Covid which has abruptly interrupted a positive trend: the families involved have gone from 6.4 to 7.7% in 12 months and individuals have risen from 7.7 to 9.4% .
The Istat survey shows that the incidence varies from 9.5% in the Center to 14.5% in the South. Compared to 2019, the conditions of minors worsened nationally (from 11.4% to 13.5%) and in particular in the North (from 10.7% to 14.4%) and in the Center (from 7.2% to 9.5%). Disaggregating by age, the incidence is confirmed to be higher in the 7-13 year olds (14.2%) and 14-17 year olds (13.9%, increasing) compared to the 4-6 year olds (12.8%) and 0-3 years (12.0%, up compared to 2019).
What is worrying is the growing incidence of absolute poverty among the largest families: 20.5% are those with five or more members and 11.2% those with four; it stands at around 8.5% if there are three in the family. On the other hand, the incidence of poverty is lower, at 5.6%, in families with at least one elderly person and falls to 3.7% among couples where the age of the family reference person is over 64 years (in in the case of single people over 64, the incidence is equal to 4.9%). In general, family poverty shows a decreasing trend as the age of the reference person increases; generally, in fact, the families of young people have lower spending capacity because they have lower average incomes and have fewer savings accumulated over the course of their lives or inherited assets.
In detail, absolute poverty concerns 10.3% of families with a reference person between 18 and 34 years of age and 5.3% of those with a reference person over 64 years of age. Compared to 2019, the incidence of poverty increases among families with a reference person aged 35-44 (from 8.3% to 10.7%) and among those in which the reference person is between 45 and 54 years old ( from 6.9% to 9.9%).
Furthermore, the spread of poverty decreases as the qualification increases. If the reference person has obtained at least the upper secondary school diploma, the incidence is equal to 4.4% while it stands at 10.9% if he has at most the middle school license (both modalities increasing compared to 2019 ).
“The numbers provided by Istat are worse than any forecast and attest to the fact that in Italy there is a new population of poor people,” says the president of Codacons, Carlo Rienzi.