(Finance) – The decontribution for those who hire under 35s “is absolutely a good start. The new budget brings improvements in favor of young people and employment and we will continue to move forward on this. The maneuver is coherent, prudent, and should help in the future”. INPS president Gabriele Fava on the sidelines of a press conference at the Bocconi University in Milan, in which the strategic project lines of INPS were presented, especially towards the world of young people and the active policies to be implemented in favor of the sustainability of the pension system.
In Italy, as recalled by the INPS director of studies and research Gianfranco Santoro taking up the report presented by the body in September, there are 10.4 million young people between 18 and 34 years old. Those who work are around 7 million, of these “80% have stable contributions in the last five years, covering on average around 80% of the entire period”. The remainder, to be considered precarious or even without insurance coverage, can be supported, as observed by the Social Security Institute, “by social safety nets among the most inclusive and generous of the European Union countries or by social and working inclusion tools such as Training and Work Support”.
Regardless of their employment status, all young people, as INPS says, “will benefit from a fully contributory pension system, therefore informing them of its functioning is not only useful, but fulfills a right-duty of the State, as expressed in the second paragraph of article 3 of the Constitution”. The objective, as Fava says, “precisely aware of the concerns in the future, And try to make the pension system increasingly sustainable and balanced“.
As far as the general picture that emerges is concerned, it is “a very positive situation in which – specifies the Inps general manager Valeria Vittimberga – active policies are bearing significant fruit”. In 2023 “there was an important implementation in the number of employed, generally stable employment of permanent jobs and in the first half of 2024 the trend is still one of growth”. For the DG “this is very important not only for the Italian GDP and for the Italian economy, but it is also very important for the balance of the social security system and, consequently of the pension system”.
To have a solid social security system, in short, for INPS it is necessary to offer young people regular job opportunitiesreducing transition times both from the education and training system to work, and from one job to another, with “adequate measures of active labor policies”. The imperative is to exploit the skills acquired in initial training to achieve the objective of increasing work productivity and reducing training mismatchrebuilding the circuit of trust in the future because tomorrow’s pension is built with today’s work.
One of the main results highlighted this year by INPS concerns i 26.6 million insured workers (+4% compared to 2019). As Santoro observes, the number of insured people has always grown from 2019 onwards, and “we have recorded 1.1 million more insured people, driven by employed work, and a slight decline in self-employed work, especially employees working in companies non-agricultural private companies, public employees and those registered with separate management”.
From a territorial point of view, then, Lombardy represents approximately 20% of insured workers, considering that one in six private companies in the non-agricultural sector operates there, and with around 5 million positions, 5% more than in 2019.