At the end of 2024, the Italian business registry recorded a positive balance, with the balance of openings and closures standing at +36,856 in the twelve months just ended. The 322,835 registrations of new businesses were echoed by 285,979 terminations of existing businesses, for a growth rate of the entrepreneurial base that stands at +0.62% (up from +0.70% in 2023). However, the demographic dynamics of the production system show signs of difficulty, particularly on the front of the pace of new business openings, marked by one of the lowest birth rates in the past 20 years (worse only in the Covid years) and the widening phenomenon of “empty cradles" in a growing number of Italian municipalities. In 2024, in fact, business registers recorded a "zero" in the territories of 478 municipalities, compared with 374 ten years earlier and 212 in 2004. This is some of the evidence emerging from Movimprese data on the trend of business demographics in 2024, compiled by Unioncamere and InfoCamere on the basis of the Chambers of Commerce Business Register.