Rethinking Italian inner areas: lessons from the potential demography

The National Strategy for Inner Areas (NSIA) categorizes Italian municipalities based on their distance from "poles", i.e. centres providing essential services. Inner areas (IAs) are municipalities located within a certain distance from the poles. Although the NSIA aims to counteract depopulation and ageing processes affecting IAs, traditional demographic indicators, as the ones officially released by Istat annually, have not been considered to identify them. For this reason, we aim to provide a demographically nuanced representation of IAs. In particular, we exploit the concepts of potential demography to delineate a demographic profile of the Italian IAs, both in actual and predictive terms. The idea of Potential Years of Life is used to assess the future economic potential of the IAs' population. The preliminary application shows a complex situation that the NSIA classification failed to capture. A discrepancy between the IAs experiencing the strongest demographic distress and the territories receiving national funding has emerged.