The cost of the brain drain from Italia: 16 billion lost every year

Every day, including public holidays, an average of 220 young people leave the country because they have found work elsewhere. These two daily flights, taking off mainly for other European countries or North America, are packed with university graduates, who account for 44.2 per cent of passengers, compared with 30.1 per cent of their peers who remain in the country. And so the country loses 16 billion a year – the value of public investment in developing skills that go on to generate value elsewhere.

Analyses of the pathway from education to university and research clearly highlight the cross-cutting nature of the strategies that should be implemented to ensure the country has adequate prospects for growth following the NRRP. This is the crux of the report on ‘Drivers of Growth’, edited by Roberto Garofoli with the support of ANCI (published in *Il Sole 24 Ore* on 25 September). In its most basic form, the central idea of the Report is that there are no sectoral strategies capable of developing in isolation, and there is no clear boundary separating development measures from social and welfare policies – which are often pitted against one another in public debate. The chapters devoted to education, universities and research demonstrate this.

At the top of the pyramid, the Report argues, the phenomenon to be tackled is not skilled emigration in itself, but the negative balance whereby the robust outflow is offset by figures that are far too meagre on the inflow side, because in terms of attractiveness, Italia ranks 34th out of the 38 OECD countries. The task of restoring the balance should be entrusted to a steering group, based at Palazzo Chigi and open to ministries and local authorities, and to an Observatory on Attractiveness involving Istat, the Bank of Italy, INAPP and SVIMEZ to monitor the objectives and outcomes of an integrated policy which, modelled on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), must be based on precise targets and clear timelines.

This governance framework must address specific measures, such as consolidating investment in research and stabilising the skills development initiatives launched under the Plan. But it must also broaden its focus to include labour market policies, first and foremost to rebalance a system of incentives that currently focuses on the supply side (such as the generous tax breaks for ‘returnees’) but fails to stimulate demand from businesses (for example, through social security contribution relief targeted at strategic sectors and critical areas). This range of measures must draw on existing initiatives, such as the Emilia-Romagna model of Welcome Offices to manage the administrative procedures for those settling in Italia, or the German model of a single multilingual portal that brings together all the key information.

But the so-called ‘brain drain’ is merely the latest link in a chain that remains dysfunctional, despite the results achieved by the NRRP, which now need to be consolidated. The ITS (Technical Institutes), which boast an 84 per cent employment rate one year after graduation and an almost total (93 per cent) alignment between training programmes and employment, have doubled their enrolment figures, but they are still a long way from the minimum target of 100,000 students, which would be essential to truly meet business demand (120,000 qualified candidates per year, of whom 57 per cent are almost impossible to find). The school drop-out rate has fallen to 8.2 per cent, but in upper secondary schools, the minimum standard of mathematical skills remains a pipe dream for 51 per cent of pupils (60 per cent in the South), and the same is true of Italian in lower secondary schools. A school system with teachers who are not necessarily more numerous, but more motivated and better selected (the recruitment reform has effectively been dismantled) should restore education to what it has ceased to be: an essential social ladder in a democracy.