Worse than us, Greece. Meager, very meager consolation to be penultimate in Europe. Italy is the second country with the lowest employment rate, with as much as 10 percentage points below the average. It is also the country with the greatest regional employment differences, further exacerbated by gender disparity. And Sardinia? It could only be part of the lower part of the ranking of regions.
Italy is bad in Europe
A useful indicator to understand the employment situation of a population is precisely the employment rate which allows us to quantify the portion of the population that is actually doing a job. “With an unemployment rate of 9.4% in 2020, our country is not particularly far from the European average of 7.2%. At the same time, however, it is second to last in all of Europe for the employment rate, followed only by Greece. In 2020, less than 60% of the working-age population was employed, moreover with a slight worsening compared to 2019, probably due to the pandemic ", underlined the Openpolis experts in the study carried out recently on this topic. Exactly 58.4% of the Italian population of working age, in 2020, had a job; 1.1 percentage points lower than the 2019 rate.
"In terms of national employment rate, Italy ranks below most of the southern European countries and also quite far from Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, where working conditions are also often difficult », Specify from the Foundation. First in Europe the Netherlands with 77.8% of employed persons of working age (between 15 and 64 years), followed by Germany with 76.2 and Sweden 75.5%. Just above Italy, Ireland and Spain with 60.9%.
The Sardinia drama
«By examining the data at the local level, we also see that there are strong differences not only between the various states of Europe, but also between the regions within them. However, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily are the only European regions in which less than 50% of the population of working age is employed ”, underlines Openpolis. In 2020 the employment rate in Sardinia was 52.1%; in all of Europe worse than the island only in those three Italian regions.
