Italian families facing crisis, needs and new demographic trends (2004)

The new definition of protection and welfare systems is taking on rather complex features that are difficult to regulate in a negative economic situation, with a welfare model that is becoming increasingly residual and selective. The poverty risk is widening and the causes are many: the progressive withdrawal of welfare, the vertical drop in the quality of services, the transformation of the labour market that imposes a new social Darwinism, the impoverishment of the middle classes constrained to protect themselves, for the first time in decades, from the danger of a pressing proletarianisation. The Eurispes dossier shows, among other things, that Italy devotes barely 0.9% of its national income to family policies. All the other EU-15 countries spend much more on the family, including Portugal and the Netherlands, which devote 1.2 per cent of their GDP to family policies.