Economy and population

Who lives in the region around a property, what do they earn and what do they produce? These are the context questions an investor asks before looking at a shop, an office or a hotel, and public answers exist: ISTAT for population, employment, GDP and exports; the Ministry of Economy and Finance for declared incomes; the Bank of Italy for its readings of the regional economy.

Here are the essential figures for Friuli Venezia Giulia, for its former provinces and for the four provincial capitals, with the year beside every column.

The provinces are the former provinces. As administrative bodies they no longer exist, but ISTAT still publishes its series on those boundaries. Residents are counted at 1 January, and the latest year is an estimate.

Average total income is total declared income divided by those who declare a total income; average taxable income is divided by all taxpayers, which is why it comes out lower. Both come from personal income tax (IRPEF) returns: they describe declared incomes, not household wealth.

For property, these figures are context. Population and its age structure bear on retail and on the demand for services; declared incomes on the spending power around a shop; employment and exports on the demand for offices and industrial space. None of them sets a price on its own.

Exports from the region move with cruise-ship deliveries, which sit in the “other transport equipment” division. To read the trend in the rest of the economy, the table also shows exports without that division, which we calculate from the same data.

• GDP for the latest year is not yet in ISTAT’s regional accounts; GDP per head for the provinces arrives a year after the regional figure; there is no GDP by municipality.
• Employment by province comes from a sample survey: in the smaller provinces the sampling error matters.
• The latest year of exports is provisional.
• No income by district or postcode: public sources stop at the municipality.