View from London: Italy is running out of Italians

The chaos and decay of the south are now spreading right across Il Bel Paese, The Telegraph writes.

The first thing you notice is the roads. Mamma Mia, are they bad. You can be driving on a main road between two proper towns and every hundred metres there is a pothole big enough to swallow a Fiat 500. Or so it feels. After a week of swerving, my nerves are shot and my axles are not much better.

In 2014 Rome half-abolished Italy's provinces. It scrapped their elected governments, stripped their budgets – but left them owning 130,000 kilometres of road. Maintenance became a fiction. By 2017 provincial presidents were filing formal complaints with public prosecutors: legally covering themselves for the day the busted tarmac murdered someone. A year later, Genoa's Morandi bridge fell into the Polcevera.

Once you've noticed the dodgy roads, you start seeing everything else. The abandoned factories with their smashed skylights. The tatty, dying shopping centres. The graffiti almost everywhere.

This is what European decline looks like, and it has numbers attached.

Italy is the only major economy where real wages are lower than they were in 1990. GDP per head has barely budged since the euro arrived. Car production – in the land of Fiat, Alfa and Lancia – has collapsed to levels last seen in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, China has swallowed the textiles, shoes and furniture that once meant "Made in Italy" was an honourable boast.

And beneath it all is something starker: Italy is running out of Italians. Last year the country recorded 355,000 births – an all-time low and down nearly 40 per cent since 2008 – against 652,000 deaths. That is a natural loss of almost 300,000 people: a Verona, erased, annually. With a fertility rate of 1.14 and a median age of 49.1, Italy the oldest country in the EU.

What looks like decay may simply be what a very old country looks like – too few young workers to patch the tarmac, too few young families to fill the shops, too few taxpayers to pay for any of it.

Note the direction of travel: an ageing society, flatlining productivity, a state that cannot fix the basics. Italy may be the future of every Western nation that can't make babies, and can't compete with China.

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