The much-cited brain drain is increasingly on everyone’s lips, but why? From those who refer to it in a romantic way, mixing the sadness and discontent of leaving the place of one’s affections, to those who make it an economic issue, sometimes conservative with a touch of nationalism, alluding to the fact that those born and raised in Italy must contribute to the development of the Nation, it is a problem that affects everyone. Educated and less educated, rich and poor, north and south: for every young person who enters Italy from a European country, seventeen expatriate to the rest of Europe (Eurostat data 2023). And these numbers are probably incomplete, as Federico Fubini states in Corriere – L’Economia, according to whom “real” emigrants could reach 3.2 times those declared by Istat (October 2023).
A shame, of course, with a very high cost of 4.5 billion euros per year for the State, according to the “Generative Italy Report” of the Catholic University of Milan. Putting aside purely political considerations, we are actually faced with an investment that does not have a positive return. Especially because, generally, those who leave have a much greater education than those – very few – young people who enter.
This is why, in addition to working on bringing back to Italy the brains that have already fled – a strategy that the current government decided to weaken significantly last year – we should build an attractive and reassuring ecosystem to retain those who want to go abroad exclusively for the better working conditions offered. And not for a conservative or nationalist reason, but for a simple principle: those who have lived and studied in Italy must have the right to be able to contribute to their community and live their existence peacefully here, without having to flee to pay rent or support a family. Clearly, the issue of wages has an impact, the least increased in Europe in recent years, on which we must work with fiscal policies and investments to encourage greater and at the same time fair productivity. But the flight of talents is also fought by building superior working conditions, improving the work/life balance, stable contracts, fiscal policies, and protections for freelancers.
If it is true that three out of ten young people would be willing to emigrate for better working and living conditions, to overcome the gender gap and increase financial autonomy (2021 Report Fondazione Visentini/Luiss), then this is where we need to start again: making the ground fertile for a country that invests in a global, open, but at the same time sustainable community. Otherwise the demographic decline will continue to increase and investments will yield less and less, reducing Italy not only to a “tail light”, but also to a dependency on the economies and industries that run faster. We have the cards, we need the strategies.
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