Towards the identification of a Systemic Depopulation Areas Index: the case of Molise

Southern European populations are shrinking and over-ageing. Concerns about the negative effects of a severe population shrinking on the future economic development and social cohesion of Europe are increasingly taking over in official documents, debates and policy planning. Recent studies agree that current decline of population in developed countries is a systemic depopulation process, path-dependent, self-powering and geographically heterogeneous, with a high degree of inertia. These considerations call for new measures able to evaluate efficacy of political measures to contrast depopulation in certain areas. In this paper a proposal for a sensible and simple index able to identify the existence/absence of a systemic depopulation process at local level is proposed, using time series analysis. The new index is tested over the period 2002-2021 on the municipalities of a region located in the South of Italy: Molise. This index might be a useful tool to evaluate the future policy efficacy of SNAI (National Strategy for “Inner Areas”, that is a national social cohesion policy program) and RRP (Next Generation EU), capturing potential inversions in depopulation processes at local level. Moreover, results highlight a potential mismatch at local level between geographic areas of policy intervention, and the areas more in need of an intervention to stop the population decline. This last result call for some further considerations on the local administrators’ ability level, that in turn could be related to the population decline itself, ending to be part of the self-powering systemic depopulation process.