No more bambinos? Italy's firms move to tackle birth crisis

Children pose by a window inside a nursery of Cartigliano, a small town in northern Italy where firms are offering money to families to help them enrol children in nursery schools, Italy May 27, 2022. REUTERS/Manuel Silvestri

Businesses in the sleepy Italian town of Cartigliano are so worried about its declining birth rate and lack of workers that they have begun paying families' nursery school fees and childcare costs to spur them to have more babies.

Cartigliano, a town of 3,800 inhabitants and scores small businesses in the northeastern Veneto region, is not unique. Similar schemes have sprung up around Italy's industrial north as exasperated firms of all sizes take matters into their own hands to try to arrest an acute demographic crisis.