Starting from 2011, with the sovereign debt crisis, a new emigration began in Italy, known as “brain drain”, more than 700,000 young people between 18 and 34 years old left the country net of those who returned. So how can we make the country attractive again? The report “Young Expats. How to make them return” is developed around this question, published by Cnel on 7 September 2026 and developed by REF Ricerche with Questlab. This study does something new: it asks those who left why they did so and under what conditions they would return. 2,532 responded, of which 1,803 questionnaires were included in the analysis. A useful warning right from the start: the questionnaire was open and online, and 93% of those who responded had at least a degree, compared to 41% of real expatriations recorded by Istat. What follows is the voice of young emigrant graduates, not of all emigrants.
How many young Italians are leaving and where are they leaving from: the Cnel report 2026
Between 2011 and 2024, 441 thousand young people between the ages of 18 and 34 left Italy, net of returns: one twentieth of young Italian residents. In the same period, the 18-34 age group shrank by 1.2 million people and 38% of that decline is explained by emigration. 2024 is the worst year of the series: 77,897 cancellations against an average for the period of 45 thousand, and just 16,833 returns.
What distinguishes this wave from those of the twentieth century is who leaves. In 2024, 40% of emigrants aged 18-34 had a degree, in 2012 the share was 25.7%. And we start from the richest regions: in absolute terms Lombardy, Veneto and Sicily lead.
However, the report introduces a significant correction. Recalculating the flows by place of birth instead of last residence, the cancellations attributed to the North drop from 307 thousand to 224 thousand (-27%), those from the South, however, by only 13%: this means that a part of the “Lombard emigrants” were southerners who first moved to the North. The same filter reduces returns, because around a third of young Italians registered from abroad were born outside Italy.
What is the Isfm index and why the positive migratory balance is not enough
The most common objection is that Italy still has a largely positive migratory balance. It’s true, and it is immigration that supports the young population: 18-34 year old residents have gone from 15.2 million in 1994 to 10.4 in 2025, and without arrivals from abroad they would be 8.4. But that question measures how many young people there are, not how competitive Italy is.
To answer this last question, the CNEL has developed the Synthetic Index of Migration Flows (ISFM): how many young citizens of a country emigrate to other advanced countries, divided by how many young people from those countries arrive there. The lower the value, the more attractive the country is. The comparison between countries with equal economies and development indices is fundamental, because only between similar systems in terms of income and rights does the migratory movement measure attractiveness rather than the development gap.
According to Eurostat data, Switzerland scores 0.3, the United Kingdom and Austria 0.4, the others fluctuate around one. Italy stands at 14.5, one of the highest values in advanced countries. On bilateral ISTAT data, the exchange with Switzerland is 44 to 1, with the United Kingdom 18 to 1, with Germany and Ireland 13 to 1.
Even the regional Isfm says something counterintuitive: it ranges from 5 in Tuscany and Lazio to 30 in Calabria, but in the South the value is high above all because almost no one arrives, not because more people leave than elsewhere.
How to calculate the 16 billion euros lost every year
It is the figure destined to circulate more than any other, and it is worth knowing where it comes from. It does not measure lost productivity: estimating the income that those people would have produced in Italy would be correct in theory but impractical. The CNEL therefore used a proxy, i.e. how much it cost to train those who leave.
The bill adds up public spending on education, from primary to tertiary according to OECD values, and family spending to raise a child up to the age of eighteen: 175,642 euros, 2020 Federconsumatori estimate updated to 2024 prices. The total is 159.5 billion for the period 2011-2024. Focusing on the three-year period 2022-24, which better reflects the current composition by qualification, we arrive at 16 billion per year, almost one point of GDP.
It is an underestimate, and the report states it: nursery schools, nursery schools, healthcare and transport remain out. The impact is then asymmetrical. In absolute value, Lombardy leads, with 28.4 billion cumulative, but in relation to the regional GDP the hemorrhage is the strongest in Calabria and Alto Adige, around 1.7%, compared to 0.5% in Emilia-Romagna and Lazio.
Why they leave Italy and what expats ask for: wages, merit and gender equality
Low wages are the reason for leaving for 88%, followed by backward work culture (80.7%) and poorly valued skills (74.6%). At the bottom there are the quality of life (30.9%) and the cultural climate (29.2%). Regarding return, 83% indicate the increase in salaries as extremely relevant and 72% indicate adequate opportunities, while housing and services close the ranking.
The wage gap is documented: at purchasing power parity, between 2000 and 2024 the Italian position went from a 1% advantage to a 7% delay towards Spain, from +14% to +36% towards Germany, from +39% to +71% towards Switzerland.
The most interesting thread, however, is that of gender. Men indicate wages as the only priority in 61.7% of cases, women in 43.5%, and the latter focus more on job opportunities (24.7% versus 12.9%). 38.6% of women definitely still see themselves abroad in five years, compared to 25.3% of men.
The Spanish Plan de Retorno and the law of Emilia-Romagna
In the report, CNEL describes two models that could be taken as examples to structure return policies, the Plan de retorno a España and the regional law it-ER international talents of Emilia-Romagna. The first was presented in 2019 with the aim of “making Spain a country to return to”: fifty measures distributed across ten ministries, over 24 million euros in the first two years, a one-stop shop and the revision of the so-called “Beckham law”, the preferential tax regime which, by requiring ten years of residence abroad, excluded recent expatriates. The pilot program, out of 200 participants, produced 58 returns, but started a few weeks before the pandemic; a new state plan was announced at the beginning of 2025.
The second is the regional law 2/2023 of Emilia-Romagna, the first organic Italian framework law on talent attraction, supported by the it-ER program active since 2019. The difference compared to Madrid is the breadth of the target: not only those who have emigrated, but also foreign talents and those from other Italian regions.
It is in the conclusion that the CNEL arrives at its clearest thesis. When young people talk about policies they are referring to company policies: in the ranking of conditions for return everything that depends on companies is at the top, what is up to the State is at the bottom. Hence the final question, which is valid as a program: is it the companies that have to increase the demand for high education, or is it the country that has to settle for remaining less educated?
