Italy: No Country for Young Men (and Women): The Italian Way of Coping with Increasing Demands for Labour Market Flexibility and Rising Welfare Problems

A book published a few years ago was titled Why Some Peoples are More Unemployed than Others(Therborn, 1986), a rhetorical question to stress the fact that social risks are not equally distributed in human societies. Non-equally distributed risks in a population – particularly the new risks originating in the labour market – are one of the reasons for the existence of modern welfare systems. They were developed and ‘shaped’ in a specific period to cover historically determined social risks that have now changed profoundly due to the global processes of economic internationalization. The growing gap between the forms of social risks and the old configurations of welfare states constitutes the crucial problem in any reasoning on welfare today, also in consideration of the growing inequality that derives from such a gap. It is usually assumed that both path-dependent factors and specific institutional processes affect this inequality trend (Blossfeld et al., 2005). This issue is particularly at stake in today’s Italy (Barbieri and Scherer, 2005, 2007, 2008; Boeri and Perotti, 2002; Rossi, 1997), where powerful groups such as babyboomer insider cohorts have managed to shift the uncertainty arising from globalization processes onto the younger, post-1960 generations who find themselves confronted with strongly diminishing chances of enhancing and improving their position. A new and deep cohort fracture has emerged as an aspect of a clear trend towards social inequality showing that – along with the persistence of ‘classic’ forms of ascriptive inequality – the processes of labour market and welfare state reform and especially the failure to adapt the latter (D’Ambrosio and Gradin, 2003; Ferrera, 1998; Orsini, 2001) to a new configuration of social risks are becoming factors that will inevitably have profound effects on the intergenerational levels of equity and equality in Italian society (Barbieri et al., forthcoming; Barbieri and Scherer, 2009).