Marital breakdowns in Italy: recent regulatory changes and territorial analysis

Abstract

In the last years, two laws have deeply changed the regulation of marital breakdowns in Italy. Between these two, the law n. 162/2014 introduces the possibility of employing extrajudicial agreements for consensual separations and divorces and paves the way for more innovative behaviors, among couples without minor or economically dependent children. By the means of spatial statistical tools, the paper detects the geographical (at province/NUTS 3 level) pattern of the incidence of extrajudicial agreements for marital breakdowns over total number of separations and divorces. The spreading of these new procedures resulted as not homogeneous on the Italian territory as the individuals living in neighbouring provinces tend to display similar relative levels of extrajudicial agreements