Welfare, Italy's future is at stake on human capital, starting with young people

The country's future depends on investments - both in education and in health and social policies - in human capital: from infancy to the very young and young school-age and university students, from women to workers including health workers such as doctors and nurses. This is the route traced by Think Thank 'Welfare Italy' in its Report 2025 on 'Human Capital: the new lever of national competitiveness'. Which takes stock of the 'capacity' of welfare in Italy, but also looks at the necessary investment in the development of people from birth.
With a reversal of course on the enhancement of 'human capital', the Report estimates that 2.8 million more people could be employed and a 10.6% leap in GDP equal to +226 billion.
A prospect that has been lacking until now: today, the country's growth of "zero point zero", in a context of necessary austerity against a monstrous public debt of 3 trillion, is also affected by policies that are decidedly short-sighted with respect to people. All of this in an unprecedented demographic scenario: in 2024 we will have the lowest birth rate with 370 thousand new births, a natural balance of -281 thousand and a population that will drop to 54.8 million by 2050, with the proportion of over-65s approaching 35%.
In this framework, young people are falling behind or leaving: in a context of 1.3 million children in absolute poverty concentrated in the South, as well as of a "social lift at a standstill" with an equal number of 1.3 million "Neet", more and more graduates are choosing to go abroad. Hence the trancing warning to politics and institutions in general from The European House - Ambrosetti and Teha Group CEO Valerio De Molli: stop "being oriented towards the 20 o'clock news and not towards the next 20 years".

In Italy, welfare - broken down into its four components health, social policies, social security and education - absorbs EUR 669.2 billion, or 60.4% of total public spending, with the social security component accounting for 16% of GDP. All items are growing strongly in the 2019-2025 period: social policies (+35.2%), welfare (+25.3%), health (+24.8%) and education (+21.1%). This is the balance outlined by the Report, which is promoted by Unipol in collaboration with Teha Group and with the support of a scientific committee comprising Veronica De Romanis (Professor of European Economic Policy - Stanford University, Florence and Luiss Guido Carli, Rome); Giuseppe Curigliano (Director of New Drug Development for Innovative Therapies, Ieo), Giuseppe Guzzetti (former Chairman of Fondazione Cariplo) and Stefano Scarpetta (Director of the OECD's Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs).
Inequalities are persistent: 23.1% of Italians are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, with strong territorial heterogeneity and increasing. "The sustainability of welfare is under pressure due to the demographic decline," De Molli stressed, "in the next fifteen years we will lose 6.5 million inhabitants and the over-65s will become 35% of the population. A scenario that, according to Welfare Italia, makes it necessary to focus on the full valorisation of human capital as a strategic sustainability axis: it is necessary to invest in education (today the school drop-out rate is 9.8% and the share of university graduates aged 25-34 is 31.6% compared to a European average of 44.1%), life-long learning, a competitive labour market, attraction/retention of skills (in 2024, more than 49,000 Italian university graduates will escape) and prevention (today only 5.6% of public health expenditure is for prevention).

The 2025 Report focuses on Italy's human capital strategy, recognising that the sustainability of welfare does not depend only on financial resources, but on the capacity to generate and enhance skills, productivity and participation. Human capital is both input of the economic system - through labour, knowledge and innovation - and final beneficiary of welfare, as citizen, worker, student or pensioner.

Spending on education in Italy is 3.9 per cent of GDP (below the Eurozone average of 4.6 per cent), with spending per student lower than in the main European countries. School drop-outs persist (9.8% of 18-24 year-olds, over 400,000 young people) and the proportion of 25-34 year-old graduates is still low (31.6% vs. a European percentage of 44.1%). The report calls for up-to-date training methods (including AI-learning), external quality assessment, re-functioning of school infrastructures - extended openings, community services - and more effective orientation in transitions. In parallel, it promotes life-long learning and skills certification to align profiles and needs.

Youth unemployment is at 19.3 per cent; female employment in Italy (at 57.4 per cent) remains below the EU average by more than 13 points (70.8 per cent); the country is experiencing a graduate drain (more than 49,000 in 2024) with an estimated cost of EUR 6.9 billion per year. It is necessary to act on youth, female and senior employment, reduction of pay gaps, quality of work and organisational wellbeing, to transform education and skills into effective participation and productivity.