“OMG, this must be the longest post in the whole blogosphere since Billmon sneaked away.”

I just finished up with a second - companion piece - on Italian fertility for Demography Matters, I fear that may be even longer :).

“the Italian population the oldest in Europe (I think).”

Well, it is sort of neck-and-neck race between Germany and Italy at the moment, since they both have roughly the same median population age (43), but you are right, no it doesn’t look good.

“Are any of the party platforms proposing to do much about housing? It seems that one could argue that poor access to housing explains several features of Italy, notably the demographic slowdown (postponed marriage due to not being able to find a house)”

Well since you ask, yes, Berlusconi’s first move is to cut a property tax - though as I indicate in the article, it isn’t at all clear where he is going to get the money to do this sort of thing - and I fear we are now headed for a protracted battle with the rating’s agencies as we enter the autumn and the debt starts to tick up again.

Berlusconi, 71, yesterday promised to scrap a housing tax paid by about 15 million homeowners at his first cabinet meeting. He said he would hold that in Naples, where trash has piled up on the streets because of a disposal shortage.

I agree with Elio, finding a house doesn’t seem to be the problem, while leaving the parent’s home does. I tend to go along with Massimo Livi Bacci’s view that what Italy is suffering from is an excess of “familism”. In fact I start my DM post with a quote from Italian demographer Rossella Palomba to the effect that “Italians have fewer children because they ‘love them too much’ and not the other way around”.

Basically the argument is that the whole weight and intensity of inter-generational relations which exist in Italy produces conservatism and lack of initiative on the part of young people when it comes to taking decisions - like cohabitation, or having children out of wedlock - which their parents might frown on.

In the context of an inverting population pyramid the weight of this social conservatism can prove fatal. Indeed you could say Italy is “being killed by love”, pretty much like Odysseus would have been if he hadn’t broken out of the grip of the Lotus Eaters.

In fact despite the plethora of post-hoc economic explanations for the fertility behavior of young Italians - the high cost of housing, young adult unemployment, or temporary employment etc. - none of these are really entirely convincing, not least because survey after survey seems to show that fully-employed young Italian adults find it to their liking to remain in the parental home, where they typically pay almost nothing for their upkeep, have their mother do all their cooking and wash, and can spend money on cars, vacations, discos or whatever.

One of the most remarkable features of these intergenerational links is the way in which they are reflected in physical space. Indeed the physical proximity over time between children and parents in Italy may even have increased, since young Italian adults not only are now leaving the family home later, when they finally do finally go they often end up living at a very close distance to their parents, almost as if they had never left the village. Furthermore, visits and telephone calls between parents and children occur with much greater frequency in Latin cultures than would be considered typical in Northern Europe.

A 1994 national survey found that, among young wives in the 25-34 age group, 29% lived in the same home or same building as their parents, another 37% were within one kilometer, and an additional 19% in the same town. These figures were little different for older women who had living parents. In 2005 it was found that Italian children are more likely to live near parents than those in any other European country. In fact during the last quarter of the 20th century only 30% of newly married Italian couples settled farther than one kilometre away from at least one set of parents, and one in four settled at less than one kilometre from both sets of parents.

In this context parental attitudes concerning household formation choices have an important influence on their children when they decide to form (or not to form) a household, net of the attitudes and values of the children themselves. There is plenty of empirical evidence that during the household formation decision-making process Italian parents are very willing to provide generous support to their children if they conform to parental expectations, and one of the clearest areas where this kind of moral sanctioning operates is when it comes to buying a home.

Actually Eliseo may be right to draw attention to the role of the banks at the end of the day, since in Spain - where the banks were notoriously offering 100% of valuation plus mortgages up to August last year - ages at leaving home may well have dropped since the turn of the century - whereas in Italy many banks were still demanding a 20% deposit, and hence the bond with the parent was strengthened.

Of course the long run effect on fertility of this more “lax” attitude in the banking sector now remains to be seen, as it is not clear just how many of those very heavily indebted Spanish young people may also be soon finding their way back to their family home as their over valued and over leveraged flat suddenly goes up for auction.

Unfortunately does not bode well for the future with the Italian population the oldest in Europe (I think).