Towards the Identification of a Systemic Depopulation Areas Index: the Case of Molise

Southern European populations are shrinking and ageing. Concerns about the negative impact of significant population decline on Europe’s future economic development and social cohesion are increasingly featured in official documents and public debates. Recent studies agree that the current population decline in developed countries is a systemic process, path-dependent, self-sustaining and geographically heterogeneous, with a strong degree of inertia. This paper introduces a meaningful and straightforward index – the Systemic Depopulation Areas Index (SyDAs) – easily replicable and updatable, designed to identify the presence or absence of a systemic depopulation process at the local level, using time series analysis. The new index was tested over the period 2002-2021 on the municipalities of a region in southern Italy: Molise. This index could be a useful tool for evaluating the effectiveness of future policies, such as the SNAI (National Strategy for “Inner Areas”) and the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP), (Next Generation EU) by capturing reversal in depopulation processes at the local level. The results reveal a potential mismatch at local level between the geographical areas targeted by policy interventions and those most in need of intervention to halt population decline.