Toscana Notizie – Flash Lavoro n. 62/2024

THE OVERVIEW

In Italy, in the third quarter of 2024, “labor input, as measured by hours worked, increased 0.2 percent from the previous quarter and 1.5 percent from the third quarter of 2023. Over the same period, GDP remained stationary in cyclical terms and grew by 0.4 percent in trend terms.” In Tuscany, labor demand, as expressed by starts, continues to show signs of a slowdown with the total number of new contracts -2.2 percent lower than in the corresponding period of the previous year. The decrease in hiring is widespread among sectors, with the exception of agriculture, but much more intense in industry (-8.9%) and transport and logistics services (-7.4%). Within manufacturing activities, the contraction of hiring in the fashion industry (-17.1 percent) is aggravated. A further sign of the unfavorable economic situation for the manufacturing sector is the significant increase in authorized hours of ordinary CIG between January and September this year, almost doubled compared to the same period in 2023, again fashion activities stand out, which increased from 2 million to 7 million hours, more than tripling. Employees are, however, still growing albeit at a steadily declining rate (+2.2 percent over the third quarter of 2023 and +0.5 percent over the previous quarter) driven by permanent employment. Apprenticeships and fixed-term contracts are declining while temporary workers and contractors are increasing. Among the different sectors, manufacturing registers the smallest change and, within it, Made in Italy enters negative territory with fashion-related workings all losing with the sole exception of apparel manufacturing. In other sectors, the largest increases are in pharmaceuticals, machinery and equipment manufacturing and goldsmithing. In the tertiary sector, tourism services show an above-average change as does the advanced tertiary sector. Unemployed estimated by ISTAT are lower than the third quarter 2023 figure by 24 thousand, and the unemployment rate falls from 4.4 percent to 3.0 percent. The employment rate among 15-64 year olds is on the rise for both women and men.

Insight DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER: WHAT IMPLICATIONS FOR THE LABOR MARKET?

By Silvia Duranti

The ongoing demographic decline in Italy and Tuscany and the concomitant unbalancing of the population structure toward the older age groups may have important implications for the labor market and, specifically, for the matching of supply and demand, with differentiated impacts in different territorial areas. The temporal analysis of the ratio of the population aged 60-69 to the population aged 20-29 shows strong territorial heterogeneity, as well as a general worsening of the indicator in recent decades, which will continue in the coming years, as predicted by the Irpet model. Thus, the data indicate that the structural difficulties that characterize the matching of supply and demand in our country, mostly related to qualitative issues, are likely to be compounded in the coming years by issues related to the actual availability of youth labor force capable of replacing outgoing workers, which will affect the territories of the region to different degrees. Calculating, from a forward-looking perspective, the difference between the total flow of retirees from 2023 to 2033 and the total flow of new entrants to the labor force over the same period, a demographic imbalance is not observed for Tuscany, while quite a few SLLs emerge in which part of the replacement demand, represented by the flows of retirees, will not be able to be numerically replaced by new entrants to the labor force. At the qualitative level, the most critical issues will concern the recruitment of high school graduates and, in some provinces, college graduates.