Growing generation gap: income, pensions and access to housing worsen for young people

The wall that young Italians have to climb over in order to achieve fulfilment in their private and working lives has started to rise again: it has reached 136 centimetres, compared to 100 centimetres in 2006 (the starting year), with a new worsening that comes after two years of slight improvement. For young Italians, due to 'structural' delays, it remains difficult to open the doors to the labour market, to access housing, and to achieve stable and lasting family and professional paths. This is a sign of how inequalities between generations are widening, not only in terms of income and wealth, but also in terms of life expectancy, psychological well-being and access to basic services.

This is the picture taken by the 7th Report 2025 by the RiES Foundation's Youth Policies Observatory entitled 'The generation gap, new generations, old imbalances: breaking inertia', edited by Professor Luciano Monti (lecturer in European Union Policies at the Luiss University), presented at the Luiss University. Through the Generational Divide Index (GDI), the delay accumulated by a generation in reaching the main milestones of life is measured, in 14 domains: the most critical ones concern Pensions, Poverty, Public Debt, Gender Equality, Income, Family Wealth and Welfare, Credit and Savings.

Among the worsening domains is that of youth poverty; the disadvantaged condition of the under-35s is particularly felt in terms of absolute poverty, risk of poverty and situation of severe material deprivation (i.e. the inability to pay for essential goods such as food). Another domain is also worsening, that of gender equality, i.e. the wage disparity that sees the purchasing power of young women penalised compared to their male counterparts: the gap has become double since the beginning of the measurements. The indicator on access to credit and savings creation is also bad: young people's indebtedness has worsened since Covid; here too, the height of the wall has doubled. Income, wealth and family welfare, a domain that also takes into account supplementary pensions and family investments, also worsened; in essence, the under-35s have no money to invest to plan their future, even on the pension side, because the propensity to save remains low, probably due to low wages that limit purchasing power.

For two domains, pensions and public debt, there is now a structural worsening, caused by demographic ageing that has accentuated the pressure on the pension and health systems, reducing the public investment space allocated to youth policies. The dependency ratio (the ratio of the resident population of non-working age to the population of working age) in Italia has reached 57.6 points (January 2024), with a growing intergenerational imbalance in the distribution of public resources already very unbalanced in favour of the over-65s.

The Report is accompanied by a survey of young people, which showed that only 1 in 5 young people imagine their future in their own city (again, the situation has worsened since 2006, when it was 22.7%). Thus, 4 out of 5 young people see their future in other cities. In particular, 35.9% see it abroad and 44.1% in another Italian city. Who are the young people who see their future abroad? Among those born in Italia of a foreign parent and an Italian parent, 65.1% see their future abroad, the percentage is 57.2% among young people with parents born abroad. It should be noted that 31.5% of the young children of Italian parents and 53.6% of young people born abroad imagine a future abroad. 'The theme is that if the wall is too high,' Monti comments, 'if the doors open with difficulty, our country is also unattractive to young talent from advanced economies. Next year an international comparison will be made to get a picture of the condition of young Italians compared to the under-35s of other European nations'.