According to Istat, not even during the crisis was poverty this widespread in our country. Those hit hardest include minors, foreigners and large families.
The new Istat report on poverty, published today, paints a portrait of Italy that is the worst on record since 2005, when monitoring began. This means that not even during the harshest years of the global economic crisis, which broke out in 2007, did poverty come so close to home.
It is estimated that 1 million 778,000 families were living in conditions of absolute poverty in 2017, with an incidence of 6.9 per cent, for a total that therefore reaches 5 million 58,000 people. The situation is particularly alarming in the south, where the incidence of absolute poverty among individuals reaches 11.4 per cent. At the national level, the categories most in difficulty include 2 million 472,000 women, 1 million 208,000 minors, 1 million 112,000 young people between the ages of 18 and 34 and 611,000 elderly people. Looking only at families with three or more minor children, absolute poverty reaches an incidence of 20.9 per cent.
To arrive at these estimates, Istat calculates the minimum monthly expenditure needed to purchase a basket of goods and services "essential to a minimally acceptable standard of living". Absolute poverty is defined as when a family's consumption does not exceed this threshold.
Relative poverty is different, being based on a comparison with a conventional spending threshold, which in 2017 stood at 1,082 euros for a two-person family. This condition too affects a larger pool of people than in 2016: 3 million 171,000 families, for a total of 9 million 368,000 individuals (with an incidence of 15.6 per cent). Here too, large families are the most vulnerable, especially younger ones. The incidence of relative poverty is particularly high among families of manual workers (19.5 per cent), people seeking employment (37 per cent) and foreign-only households (34.5 per cent), especially in the south.
