A productivist drift of active ageing policies in Italy: regional inequality and economic growth in 2007–2018

Introduction Active ageing is one of a family of ‘positive ageing’ paradigms—alongside healthy, successful and productive ageing—proposing a multidimensional response to population ageing that ultimately leads to better health, wellbeing and participation in later life. Critical gerontology has long argued, however, that the policy implementation of active ageing drifts towards a narrow productivist focus on later-life employment. Drawing on perspectives from political economy of ageing and place-based cumulative (dis)advantage theory, this study examines whether the multidimensional concept of active ageing is matched by multidimensional implementation across Italian regions, and how regional economic growth is associated with domain-specific trajectories. Methods Using an ad-hoc Italian version of the Active Ageing Index (AAI) at the regional (NUTS 2) level over the period 2007–2018, we decompose the contribution of the four AAI domains to overall regional AAI growth, and we estimate associations between changes in real per capita gross domestic product and changes in each domain through cross-sectional and pooled ordinary least squares models, with time-period and region fixed effects as robustness checks, complemented by sensitivity analyses. Results The study found that AAI scores rose in all regions, but the employment domain accounted for 75.5% of national growth, confirming a productivist pattern of implementation. Regional economic growth was positively associated with changes in the employment domain and negatively associated with changes in the participation in society domain—a pattern consistent with aggregate-level crowding-out of unpaid participation by paid work rather than with resource expansion. Furthermore, Southern regions combined the lowest AAI growth with the weakest conversion of economic growth into active ageing gains, consistent with place-based cumulative disadvantage. Discussion Active ageing development in Italian regions has in practice operated as productive ageing in its narrowest sense. This leads to concerns about whether regional active ageing policies in the 2000s and 2010s substantially contributed to increasing health outcomes, wellbeing and participation of older adults.