National demographic balance

As of December 31^st, 2017 Italy had 60,483,973 inhabitants, more than 5 million of which had foreign citizenship: 8.5% at national level(10.7 % in Central-northern regions, 4.2% in the South and Islands area).

The decrease in the number of inhabitants is going on: the overall balance shows an important drop (-105,472 units). The reduction applies to people with Italian citizenship: -202,884 residents, while the foreign population increases slightly, +97,412. Both male and female component of foreign population increase (respectively +67,593 and + 29,819 units).

The natural population change (births minus deaths) is negative of almost -200 thousand units. As the balance is positive for foreign nationals (almost +61 thousand units), for the Italian ones the decline is even more relevant (-251,537 units).

The decrease in the number of births started in 2008 and it is still going on. In 2017 children born were less than half a million, just over 67,933 of which were foreign (14.8% of the total). Compared to 2016, there was an overall reduction of 15,287 units (1,446 for the foreigners).

Deaths are 649,061 (33,800 more than in 2016), of which 7,306 of foreigners (+779 than in 2016).

In 2017 the international migratory flows to/from Italy determined a positive balance of 188,330 units (+44,572 compared to previous year).

Registrations from abroad increase: 343,440 (+14.2% over 2016),  87.7% of them involves a foreign citizen. On the other hand, cancellations for emigration decrease (-1.9%): for Italian nationals (by birth and by naturalization) they remain unchanged (+114,559 units) compared to the previous year; for foreigners they decrease to 40,551 (-4,7%).

The attractiveness of the northern and central regions to which are addressed most migration flows (both internal and from foreign countries) is confirmed.

In 2017 there were 146,605 new Italian citizens, 50.9% of them are women.

In Italy reside foreigners of about 200 different nationalities. Over 50% of foreign residents (more than 2.6 million individuals) are nationals of a European country. The most represented nationality is the Romanian one (23.1%), followed by the Albanian one (8.6%), and the Moroccan one (8.1%).