The League's pension flexibility costs 41.3 billion from 2019 to 2025

ROME – The season of pension flexibility opened by the League in 2019 presents the updated bill: over 36 billion euros in seven years for the Quotas and for the blocking of the adjustment to life expectancy of early pensions. If the women's option is added, the total rises to 41.3 billion between 2019 and 2025. The State General Accounting Office puts the numbers together in the new Report on medium-long term trends in the pension system.

But the cost, warns the RGS, does not end here. The increased spending corresponds to an increase in debt, to which the effects on growth must be added: early exit from work reduces employment levels and, consequently, the potential growth of the economy.

The turning point of Quota 100

The starting point is decree 4 of 2019, the flag of the League in the first Conte government. Quota 100 opens the release with 62 years of age and 38 of contributions. The same decree also freezes the adjustment to life expectancy of the contribution requirement for ordinary early retirement until 2024, stopping it at 42 years and 10 months for men and one year less for women.

To these interventions were added the Women's Option and, in subsequent years, Quota 102 and Quota 103. Formulas that became increasingly more restrictive, so much so that the Accounting Office itself observed that the effects of the subsequent extensions were "significantly more limited" than those of the first season.

Outputs at the highest levels since the beginning of the 2000s

However, the effect on retirements has been profound. The Rgs writes that between 2019 and 2025 the exit flows returned "to the maximum levels considering the period from the beginning of 2000". In the first years of Quota 100, early pensions steadily exceeded 330 thousand per year, much more than old-age pensions.

The Accounting Office explicitly speaks of an expansion of the possibilities for early retirement "in a regressive context compared to the reform process implemented in previous decades". In essence, while previous reforms, such as the Fornero reform, had progressively raised the requirements and linked expenditure to life expectancy, since 2019 that trajectory has been at least partially reversed.

The bill rises to 41.3 billion

Of the total 41.3 billion, just over 36 billion are attributable to the Quotas and the blocking of adjustments to life expectancy; approximately 5.27 billion to the women's option. The spending peak is concentrated between 2021 and 2022, when the effects of Quota 100 come into full effect and continue to drag on even after the closure of the channel to new access.

In fact, the Rgs underlines that these interventions produce multi-year effects: an early pension continues to weigh on spending for all the years that separate the actual exit from the ordinary one.

Almost as much as the fight against poverty

The most effective comparison is proposed by the Accounting Office itself. The 41.3 billion spent between 2019 and 2025 on pension flexibility are almost equivalent to the 45.2 billion allocated to measures to combat poverty in the same period.