Italian pay closes gap but still lags

Pay in Italy is still growing much more slowly than prices, but in 2023 the gap was closed slightly. This is the key message from new official figures on pay published by the Italian National Statistics office ISTAT. Over the year as a whole pay increased by 3.0%, while prices increased by 5.7%. As ISTAT points out, it was the “sharp deceleration in prices in the course of 2023 which reduced the gap … to around three percentage points, less than half the figure in 2022”. In that year, prices went up by 8.1% but pay only by 1.1%.