The Ageing Scenario of the Italian Population

Abstract

Population ageing is the most remarkable phenomenon that characterized the structure of the Italian population in the 20th century and will mark the 21st century in the same way. “Population ageing” is the increase of incidence of elderly within the total population. In highly developed countries, this phenomenon has been recording higher and higher values in in the past 50 years ; this is particularly so in the case of Italy. Even while that may be seen as “a triumph of the development and one of the greatest successes of humanity”, the phenomenon arouses a number of concerns because it involves far-reaching consequences for all social factors, thus signalling a wide range of challenges to be faced. These challenges will concern the economic and production system but, at the same time, they might also offer remarkable opportunities stemming from a new balance between generations. In this essay we will focus on the ageing phenomenon in Italy during the period between the 1951 census and 1st January 2015. The indeces that are usually created to measure the ageing rate of population are the old-age index defined as the ratio between the over-65 and the young population, and the ageing index defined as the ratio between the over-65s and the total population. In this work we use the second indicator, which is considered adequate to determine whether a population can be described as “old”.