NEETs are not the problem, they are the symptom of an Italy that punishes its young people (especially in the South)

The good news: the number of NEETs in Italy continues to decline. The bad news: our country remains at the top of this special, and not exactly uplifting, ranking. Despite the decline over the last decade, Italy remains, in the European context, one of the countries with the highest number of young people neither in education, employment, nor training , with a percentage that will reach 15.2% of all young people aged 15-29 in 2024.

A share that is certainly decreasing, if we consider that the share was 16.1% in 2023 and 19% in 2022, but which still makes Italy one of the countries that presents a particularly critical picture from this point of view.

Specifically, Italy is the country with the highest NEET rates after Romania (19.4%), followed by Lithuania (14.7%) and Greece (14.2%). The countries with the lowest NEET rates in 2024 are the Netherlands (4.9%), Sweden (6.3%), and Malta (7.2%). These countries, along with six others, have already reached the EU target for 2030.

By that date, the target is to reduce the percentage of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 who are neither in education, employment, nor training below 9% . Nine out of 27 EU member states have already reached this threshold. Italy is still more than 6 points short.

NEETs are concentrated primarily in urban areas (16.3%), a percentage that drops to 15% in both intermediate-density municipalities (14.7%) and rural ones (14.4%). Southern cities are the ones that are experiencing the greatest decline. Specifically, the 10 provincial capitals with the highest percentage of NEETs that year were Catania (42.0%), Palermo (39.8%), Naples (37.3%), Messina (33.7%), Caltanissetta (32.1%), Agrigento (31.7%), Trapani (31.6%), Syracuse (31.5%), Frosinone (30.5%), and Enna (30.4%). The provincial capitals with the lowest percentage of NEETs in 2020 were Belluno (16.1%), Pesaro (16.4%), Rimini (17.3%), Siena (17.6%), Forlì (17.7%), Prato (17.8%), Aosta (17.9%), Ravenna (17.9%), Matera (18.0%) and Grosseto (18.4%) .

Then there's a paradox unique to our country: the incidence of NEETs is higher among young people with high school diplomas than among those with at most a middle school diploma (13.3%). While at the European level, the percentage of NEETs among high school graduates (11.3%) is in line with the general average (around 11%), in Italy, among young people with high school diplomas, the percentage of those neither in education nor in employment is close to 18%. This is almost 3 percentage points higher than the national average (15.2%). Among graduates in Italy , however, it drops to 11.8% . This figure points to a difficulty with the structure of our country's labor market. But above all, it tells us a lot about the education system's ability to adequately train even those who complete secondary school.

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