Italy continues to record a dramatic decline in births, confirming a trend that seems to have no end. According to Istat data, just 379,890 children were born in 2023, 13 thousand fewer than the previous year, with a decrease of 3.4%. The data reflects a persistent demographic decline which is profoundly changing the structure of the resident population.
For every thousand inhabitants, only six children were born last year, a figure that highlights the serious birth rate problem affecting the country. Even the first seven months of 2024 do not offer better prospects: births have in fact decreased further, with 4,600 fewer children compared to the same period in 2023.
Since 2008, the year in which the number of live births exceeded 576 thousand units, the decline has been constant and worrying. In just 15 years, Italy has lost almost 200 thousand new births, a reduction of 34.1%. This negative trend is posing new challenges for society and institutions, which are struggling to counter an increasingly complex reality.
The causes of the decline in births are multiple. On the one hand, there is a decrease in first-born children, down 3.1% compared to 2022, after a slight recovery linked to the recovery of family projects postponed due to the pandemic. On the other hand, second children fell by 4.5%, while subsequent children fell by 1.7%.
The fertility rate per woman also continues to fall, reaching 1.20 children per woman in 2023, a decrease compared to 2022 (1.24). This data brings Italy back to the historic lows reached in 1995, but with a substantial difference: today, the female population is made up to a greater extent of foreign women, whose contribution to birth rates was significant in the early 2000s. However, this contribution is also decreasing, with a decrease in the number of children born to foreign parents, from 82,216 in 2022 to 80,942 in 2023.
In this context, the regions of Northern Italy continue to record the highest number of births to foreign parents, with Emilia-Romagna in the lead (21.9%). In other regions such as Liguria and Lombardy, approximately one in five births is of foreign origin. On the contrary, the South has decidedly lower percentages, with Sardinia in last place, where only 3.9% of births have at least one foreign parent.
Italy is facing a real demographic emergency, which requires targeted political and economic solutions to reverse this dangerous trend.