Italy, you know, it’s a country for old. It is in fact in fifth place in the world average ranking by country drawn up in World factbook of the CIA. The average age of our nation, in fact, according to the estimates of 2024, is of 48.4 yearswhile the oldest “oldest” country in the world is the Principality of Monaco with an average age of 56.9 years. In the opposite part of the ranking, however, we find various countries of the African continent, where the average age is drastically low, up to 15.2 years of Niger on average.
Let’s see what the causes and what the European demographic situation is.
The world average ranking by country
According to a ranking drawn up by the CIA that portrays the countries of the world classified according to the average age of the population, Italy is one of the “older” countries in the world with an average of 48.4 years. To beat our peninsula in terms of seniority, there are – by order – the principality of Monk (56.9 years), Saint Pierre and Miqualon (51.2 years), Japan (49.9 years) e Andorra (48.8 years). What we can immediately notice compared to these first places in the standings is that except Italy and Japan, these are extremely populous countries, a factor that makes statistics more easily pending towards high average ages in case of low births.
One thing that can surely impress us is the great gap between the average age of the first positions, which is around 50/40 years, and the age of the last positions, in which it even comes to 15 years in the case of Niger. The last 21 positions are all occupied by states of the African continent, in which not only is the birth rate very high, but the expectation of life is also particularly enough. According to the World Health Statisticswhile in Europe the average life expectancy is around 80 years of age, in Africa there is talk of values of about 60 years on average.
Why is Italy so old?
The short answer to the question “Why is Italy so old?”, Is that the share of the “elderly” exceeds that of “young people”, but clearly the causes of this phenomenon must be looked at. THE factors to be considered are different: the fall of the born, the increase expectation life Thanks to the increasingly developed care services, theIncrease in the level of education and the improvement of habits and life choices.
The aging of the population has among the main causes the increase in survival, allowed by improvements from the care medicals that research and health continues to increase. As for the decrease from the born, Instead, the factors are really many and mostly social. One that can surely be highlighted is that the number of people who dedicate himself to an ‘higher grade educationwhich carries a delay in the entry into the world of Work And, tendentially, they don’t have children during the course of study. This delay in the first child also affects a lot on the number of children per family, which consequently will be less.
Another extremely impactful factor are the socio-economic conditions: in Italy In the last 30 years i wages Only 1% rose, against an average of 32.5% in the OECD area (organization for cooperation and economic development). This leads families to have less children in the face of the economic impossibility of keeping them.
The demographic data of Europe
According to the report of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, the European situation It can be described as follows:
- for some years, the Annual mortality rate (in red) passed that of annual births (in blue)
Mortality rate vs birth rate in Europe. Source: United Nation - thelife expectancyapart from a negative peak during the Covid-19 pandemic, is constantly growing and is intended to climb in the coming years over 85 years
Women’s life expectancy (red) and men (blue). Sources: United Nations - while the world population is growing, the European population It has been constantly decreased since the 80s
Total world population (left) vs European population (right). Source: United Nations
