Italy still leads EU in regional employment disparities

 The employment disparity between northern and southern Italy is unmatched by any other EU
nation. Even in 2023, Italy is the European country with the greatest regional disparities: while 79.6 per cent of inhabitants between 20 and 64 years of age work in the province of Bolzano, in Campania, Calabria and Sicily, the employed are less than half of those of working age. The three southern Italian regions have the lowest employment rates in Europe.

Nothing new, but again, this year’s data released by Eurostat on employment in the regions of the EU countries make quite an impression. Overall, in 2023, the employment rate in the EU for the 20-64 age group reached 75.3 per cent, the highest figure ever recorded by the Statistical Office of the European Union, up 0.7 per cent from the previous year. While still below the average of the 27, last year, employment in Italy grew faster than in the EU bloc: from 64.8 per cent in 2022 to 66.3 in 2023.

The employment rate also grew more than the average for EU regions in the three tail-enders: Campania by 1.1 per cent, Calabria by 1.4 per cent, and Sicily by 2.5 per cent. However, the three southern Italian regions remain last in Europe, behind even those in some candidate countries such as Bosnia and Montenegro. The highest employment rates in 2023 were in the capital regions of Warsaw, Poland, at 86.5 per cent, and Bratislava, Slovakia, at 85.8 per cent. In third place was the German region of Trier, bordering Luxembourg, with 85.4 per cent.

Regarding regional disparities within member countries, Italy recorded a coefficient of variation of 16.3 per cent, almost double that of the second-largest EU state in terms of disparity, Belgium. The gap between Italian regions is slowly narrowing: ten years ago, the coefficient of variation was 18.8 per cent; in 2022, it was 16.8. But on which now hangs the unknown of the differentiated autonomy sought by the Meloni government. At the other end of the scale, the countries with the most homogeneous employment rates in their regions were Portugal, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands.

Of all the regions in Europe, Campania has a double negative record: it is not only the territory with the lowest employment rate (48.4 per cent) but also the one with the highest gender employment gap, on par with Puglia. Here, the difference between the rates recorded for men and women is astronomical, touching 29.5 per cent—almost triple the European average, where the gender employment gap in 2023 was 10.2 percentage points.