Istat, births in Italy continue to fall: -6.3% in the first seven months of the year

It is not only the birth data for 2024 that is negative. It is also that for the first few months of 2025, albeit provisional. ISTAT gives the picture, indicating 369,944 new births last year, 2.6% less than in 2023. "A contraction of almost 10,000 units". A trend that has been advancing relentlessly since 2008, when the peak of births (576,000) in the 2000s was reached. Since then, the average percentage variation has been -2.7%.

Between January and July of this year, however, there were 13,000 fewer births than in the same period in 2024 (-6.3%). Thus, historical lows were reached. Never have so few children been born, on average, per woman: 1.18 in 2024 (set to fall to around 1.13 in 2025).

A decrease that, besides depending on the low propensity to have children, 'is caused,' ISTAT explains, 'by the reduction in the number of potential parents, belonging to the increasingly smaller generations born since the mid-1970s'. Not only that, because the lengthening of training times, the precarious conditions of youth employment and the difficulty of accessing the housing market, which tend to postpone leaving the original family nucleus, also have an impact.

The North is the area that 'resists' the decline the most. It registers -5%, compared to -7.2% in the South and -7.8% in the Centre. There, in some regions, there has also been an increase - actually a recovery after the negative numbers of 2024 - in recent months: in Valle d'Aosta (+5.5%) and in the autonomous provinces of Bolzano (+1.9%) and Trento (+0.6%).

On the other hand, the number of births to parents in which at least one of the partners is a foreigner remains stable. These births, which make up 21.8% of the total, have gone from 80,942 in 2023 to 80,761 in 2024. With territorial differences, however: in the North, the percentage of births to at least one foreign parent out of the total is 30.6% in 2024; in the Centre it is 24%, and in the South it is 9.3%.