Determinants of Foreign Workers' Wages in Two Italian Regions with High Illegal Immigration (original) (raw)

The Immigrants Wage Gap in Italy

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

This paper investigates wage differentials between immigrants and natives in Italy along the entire wage distribution and try to account for them using information on observed characteristic of both populations. Analyses are based on data from the 2009 survey on "Income and Living Conditions of Households with Foreigners", the first nation-wide survey aimed at obtaining information on the socio-economic conditions of the foreign population living in Italy, and on the Italian sample of EU-SILC. Immigrants wage gap is disentangled according to three main dimensions: gender, immigrants length of stay in Italy and Italian language proficiency. We show the existence in the Italian labour market of a large wage differential between immigrants and natives which increases along the wage distribution suggesting the existence of a "glass ceiling effect" for immigrants workers. Moreover, we find evidence of (i) a large gender difference in the observed gap, with women showing a higher gap than men, (ii) an ongoing but largely incomplete assimilation process among the immigrant population and (iii) a lower gap for immigrants with higher language proficiency. Quantile regressions, Blinder-Oaxaca and Machado-Mata decompositions are applied. The counterfactual decomposition shows that individual characteristics account for only a small fraction of total observed differentials, sector controls increase the explained portion but do not account for the "glass ceiling" pattern of the gap, which instead disappears with occupation controls, suggesting that the upwardsloping shape of the (log) wage differential is a symptom of the occupational segregation characterizing the immigrant population in the Italian labour market. JEL Classification: J31, J61, F22.

Immigrant groups’ income inequality within and across Italian regions

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2018

The relationship between Italian regional income inequality and the phenomenon of migration is still under current debate. Policymakers and researchers worry about the process of assimilation of the new entrants, in a country where regional disparities are strong. We provide evidence that regional income disparities apply to groups of immigrants as well as of nationals, but the most important source of inequality rests on within-immigrant group/within-region, especially for those households with the presence of women and very young children. However, if bottom incomes were to grow, inequality would not diminish, with the exception of married individuals living in the North, for no other characteristic is correlated to inequality according to the Atkinson bottom sensitive index. We show that the uneven economic development across regions then influences the distribution of immigration both in socio-demographic and economic terms.

Studying Income Inequality of Immigrant Communities in Italy

Social Indicators Research, 2015

This article deals with the issue of economic integration of immigrants in Italy. Ethnic inequality and economic stratification are analysed based both on the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and the ad-hoc survey on households with foreign people conducted by the National Institute of Statistics in 2009. With reference to the native group and the groups identified by the largest ethnic communities living in Italy, through the Analysis of Gini decomposition technique, the article highlights that the between-group inequality accounts for a barely four percent of the overall inequality, the largest share being due to the inequalities within the groups. The policy prescription suggested is the adoption of ''peculiar'' policies on specific subgroups of immigrants aimed at reducing the disparities within the subgroups.

The Labor Market Condition of Immigrants in Italy: The case of Lombardy

Interventions économiques, 2013

Over the past few decades Italy has experienced a steep growth in immigration inflows, rapidly turning into a net immigration country. According to national statistics, in 2011 foreign-national regular residents numbered 4.57 million and stood at 7.5% of the total population, which is more than three times the 2001 figures (Istat 2012). In addition, estimates show that there are almost 900 thousand as yet unregistered or undocumented immigrants, so that the total number of foreign-nationals is 5.4 million, 95% of whom come from less developed or developing countries (Fondazione Ismu 2011). Recent data reveal that in Italy, like everywhere else in Europe, inflows have become highly differentiated, with more arrivals from Eastern Europe (mainly Romania), South Asia and South America (OECD 2011a). They are still largely driven by labor migration, but entries for family reasons have been growing rapidly. The demand for immigrant workers, even though declining, has remained high, even during the recent economic crisis: immigrant labor is cheap and tends to be concentrated on specific jobs and sectors where there is low competition with locals and where the current economic downturn has not brought about a steep decrease in demand for low-skilled labor. This is particularly true in Lombardy, the region which has received the largest number of immigrants so far and now hosts about a quarter of the foreign population resident in the country.

Working Papers Labour Market Effects of Immigration: an Empirical Analysis Based on Italian Data

Gavosto, Venturini, Villosio (1999) found that the impact of immigrants on the wage rates of natives was positive. This result has led to the present paper which analyses the effect of immigrants on native employment. Two aspects of being unemployed are considered: i) displacement risk, the probability of moving from employment into unemployment; and ii) job-search effectiveness, the probability of moving from unemployment into employment within one year. The quarterly Labour Force Survey data (ISTAT) from 1993 to 1997 are used. The transition probabilities depend on two sets of independent variables at time t: the individual’s characteristics and the external conditions of the market. A probit model is applied for repeated-cross-sections on “specific” local areas in order to check for possible autocorrelation and endogeneity. The results show that in the North of Italy, where most immigrants are located, the share of immigrants has either no effect or has a complementary effect on the probability of finding a job in the case of workers looking for a new job; while in the case of people looking for a first job (young people) the effect was negative in 1993; while it was positive in the last years. A complementary effect prevails in the case of native transition from employment to unemployment. There is a negative effect only in the manufacturing sector in Northern Italy for 1996, and this is probably due to other factors, such as the increased use of temporary contracts in that area during that year.

The Role of Immigrants in the Italian Labour Market

In little more than a decade, Italy has become a country characterized by immigration from abroad. This pattern is far removed from what central-northern European countries experienced during the 1950s and the1960s. Immigration has not been explicitly demanded by employers, nor has been ruled by agreements with the immigrants. countries of origin, nor perceived as necessary for the economic system. For all these reasons, immigration has been chaotic and managed in an emergency and approximate way, even though it is deemed useful and is requested by the .informal. as well as the .official. economy. Following presentations of statistics on trends in the phenomenon, three issues are analysed: - how immigrants are integrated into a labour market that has not called them and into circumstances characterized by the absence of public policies to help them in their job search. - whether it is possible to separate regular immigration involved in the .official. market from irregular immigration in the hidden economy, considering advantages of the first and harmful effects of the second for the Italian socio-economic system. - whether it is appropriate to address complementarity between immigrant labour and the national labour force in a country with 2,500,000 unemployed workers and heavy territorial unbalances.

Does Immigration Raise Blue and White Collar Wages of Natives? The Case of Italy

LABOUR, 2010

This paper analyses theoretically and empirically the effects of immigration on the wage rate of native workers. Empirical literature rarely finds that immigration generates a fall in the wages of manual workers. The theoretical model presented in this paper justifies those results, by hypothesizing an economic system where advanced firms buy an intermediate good from traditional firms, which employ manual workers in both clean and dirty tasks, the latter being more disliked by native workers. We conclude that native skilled wages always increase whereas native unskilled wages can both increase or decrease with immigration. An empirical analysis of the Italian labour market follows, showing that all native workers' wages rise with immigration JEL Class.: J31; J61; J82.