ITALY’S efforts to prevent a demographic time bomb backfired, after marketing campaigns featuring storks and hourglasses provoked a public outcry and had to be pulled.
The series of ads to raise awareness about the country’s low fertility rate—just 1.37 children per woman compared with a 1.58 European Union average—had slogans like, “Beauty knows no age, fertility does” with a woman holding an hourglass and others proclaiming: “Don’t let sperm go up in smoke,” or “Get going! Don’t wait for the stork.” An ad showing drops of water dripping from a nearly dry sink with the caption “fertility is a common good,” echoed a similar campaign run by dictator Benito Mussolini during Italy’s fascist era.
The ads “have clearly failed as a communication campaign,” said Francesco Daveri, a professor of economics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Piacenza. “They have nevertheless been the catalyst for a very serious economic issue that should be in focus 365 days a year.”
An aging population combined with a low fertility rate has resulted in the number of people in the 25-to-49 year range, the most productive age group, shrinking by 700,000 in the last 10 years in Italy, and it could contract by another 2 million by 2029, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The demographic pattern could erode Italy’s GDP by up to 0.6 percentage points a year, Daveri said.
“An aging population and low fertility have severe economic implications,” he said. “More health spending, a greater pension burden, but most of all, economic policies geared toward the elderly.”
Italy isn’t the only country facing declining birthrates and aging populations, and isn’t the first to push its citizens to have more children.
In Denmark—where the fertility is 1.69 children per woman—travel company Spies made news with its “Do it for Denmark” and “Do it for Mom” campaigns with humorous ads encouraging young people to have more children. The city of Copenhagen also contributed to the debate, with a government campaign reminding young people to think about children sooner, including slogans asking women if they’d “counted their eggs today?” and men if their sperm was “swimming too slowly?”
Singapore, which has an even lower fertility rate of 1.24, partnered with Mentos mint-maker in 2012 for a “National Night” ad in which a rapper encouraged citizens to have more kids saying “let’s do our civic duty and manufacture life.”
The Italian campaign included 12 images published online by the Health Ministry, whose spokesman said on Monday they were “teasers” before a broader campaign is launched. The campaign also had a government web site with a video game where players could be sperm or eggs that needed to avoid “enemies,” like contraceptive pills, cigarettes and alcohol, to reach the final goal: insemination.
Thousands of Italians complained the ads were insensitive toward the childless, sexist as they put the burden of blame on women, and didn’t address the reasons people delay having kids, like unemployment and lack of child-support services.
The ministry still plans to hold a “Fertility Day” on September 22 to discuss the demographic challenges that have prompted Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin to call Italy a “dying country.” Of particular concern is that the median age at which women have their first child is the highest in Italy, according to Eurostat data.
The demographic deficit has consequences, including a heavy pension and health-care burden for the increasingly small working population, and even investor flight.
“Old people, who generally have more savings, may want to invest in countries with a younger population and for higher profits to provide for their own support,” said Ronald Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “That makes it even harder to curb unemployment and spur growth at home.”