nach oben

Social Indicators Research

Erschienen in:

05.04.2015

Studying Income Inequality of Immigrant Communities in Italy

verfasst von: Antonella D’Agostino, Andrea Regoli, Giancarlo Cornelio, Fabio Berti

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 1/2016

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

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.

Vorheriger Artikel Structural Gender Equality in Europe and Its Evolution Over the First Decade of the Twentyfirst Century

Nächster Artikel How Does Leisure Time Affect Production Efficiency? Evidence from China, Japan, and the US

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

The term community can be used to describe a variety of relationships as well as geographical space. For the purpose of this paper the term refers to the community based on ethnic identity that is measured through the country of origin.

In this context, along the economic dimension, the assimilation can be defined as the decline of differences between groups by following Alba and Nee (1997) who describe assimilation as “the decline, and at its endpoint the disappearance, of an ethnic/racial distinction and the cultural and social differences that express it”.

Generally the issue of “social disadvantage” of immigrants includes many dimensions (culture, language, equal opportunities, to list a few) but we concentrate the attention only on the economic dimension.

In order to respond to this need, in 2009 the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) conducted the Survey on Income and Living Conditions of Household with Foreign People using both methodology and definitions harmonized with the European Statistics of Income and Living Conditions survey (EU-SILC). Therefore, the two surveys can be used for a comparative analysis between Italian and foreign households (ISTAT 2011).

This set includes: all EU-15 and EFTA countries, some of the OECD countries, some of the countries that are in the top 45 positions of the 2011 ranking based on the Human Development Indicator and finally Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia. The remaining countries are classified as countries with SMP.

The decision to define the household citizenship on the basis of the citizenship of the household head (the highest income earner) is justified since households composed of members with different citizenships constitute <2 %. Furthermore, the percentage of immigrant households composed of members who live together with no family ties is negligibly small (<1 %).

Several alternatives computational methods exist for deriving the Gini coefficient. They include the relative mean difference approach, the geometric approach and the covariance approach. Based on the covariance approach, the Gini coefficient can be expressed as \(G = \frac{{2cov\left( {y,F\left( y \right)} \right)}}{{\mu_{y} }}\) where y is the income, F(y) is its distribution function and μ _y its mean value.

Since the intra-group component results from a weighted sum of the Gini coefficients of each group, where the weights are given by the income shares of the groups, it is highly influenced by the inequality of the groups that hold the higher income shares.

The bootstrap confidence intervals are not shown here. They are available on request from the Authors.

We split further the immigrants with respect to their citizenship in order to have a sufficient number of observations for the regression analysis. However, we grouped citizenship at area level when the number of households corresponding to a particular citizenship was less than 3. Details of the classification used are available upon request.

Each explanatory variable is computed as difference with respect to the mean level observed for the Italian community, except the coefficient of variation of number of years spent in Italy and the dummy for MDC.

The high negative and significant correlation observed (−0.698, p value < 0.0001) between low and university educational level drives the choice to include only the share of the lowest educational level in the regression analysis.

We ran the model on 59 observations and checked for robustness in order to see if the results were being driven by a few special cases. We performed Robust Regression, and four countries of origin (Spain, Netherlands, Japan and Ivory Coast) have been deleted as they were depicted as outliers. Results are available on request from the Authors.

Alba, R., & Nee, V. (1997). Rethinking assimilation for a new era of immigration (pp. 826–874). New York: The Centre for Migration Studies of New York Inc.

Aldrich, H. E., & Waldinger, R. (1990). Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 111–135.CrossRef

Allasino, E., Reyneri, E., Venturini, A., and Zincone, G. (2004). Discrimination of Foreign Workers in the Italian Labour Market, International Migration Papers, No. 67, Geneva, ILO.

Ambrosini, M. (2001). La fatica d’integrarsi. Il Mulino, Bologna: Immigrazione e lavoro in Italia.

Andrews, D., & Leigh, A. (2009). More inequality, less social mobility. Applied Economics Letters, 16(15), 1489–1492.CrossRef

Berti, F., D’Agostino, A., Lemmi, A., & Neri, L. (2014). Poverty and deprivation of immigrants vs natives in Italy. International Journal of Social Economics. doi:10.1108/IJSE-12-2012-0240.

Berti, F., & Valzania, A. (2015). The integration process and social mobility: Examining Chinese immigration in the industrial district of Prato, In L. Baldassar, G. Johanson, M. Bressan and N. McAuliffe (eds), Chinese Migration to Europe: Prato, Italy and beyond, Palgrave McMillan.

Borjas, G. J. (1985). Assimilation, changes in cohort quality, and the earnings of immigrants. Journal of Labor Economics, 3(4), 463–489.CrossRef

Cesareo, V., and Blangiardo, G.C., (2011). Integration indixes. An empirical research of migration in Italy, Quaderni ISMU 2/2011, Fondazione ISMU Iniziative e Studi sulla Multietnicità.

D’Agostino, A., & Regoli, A. (2013). Life conditions and opportunities of young adults: evidence from Italy in European comparative perspective. Social Indicators Research, 113, 1205–1235.CrossRef

De Gregorio, J., & Lee, J. (2002). Education and income inequality: New evidence from cross country data. Review of Income and Wealth, 48, 395–416.CrossRef

Dorantes, C. A., & de la Rica, S. (2007). Labour market assimilation of recent immigrants in Spain. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 45(2), 257–284.CrossRef

Einaudi, L. (2007). Immigration and integration policies in Italy in rethinking immigration and integration: A new centre-left Agenda. United Kingdom: Policy Network.

Elbers, C., Lanjouw, P., Mistiaen, J. A., & Ölzer, B. (2008). Reinterpreting between-group inequality. Journal of Economic Inequality, 6(3), 231–245.CrossRef

Foley, W. M., & Hoge, D. R. (2007). Religion and the new immigrants: How faith communities form our newest citizens. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.CrossRef

Gavosto, A., Venturini, A., & Villosio, C. (1999). Do immigrants compete with natives? Labour, 13(3), 603–622.CrossRef

Hatton, T. J., & Leigh, A. (2011). Immigrants assimilate as communities, not just as individuals. Journal of Population Economics, 24(2), 389–419.CrossRef

Hickman, M., Crowley, H., & Mai, N. (2008). Immigration and social cohesion in the UK The rhythms and realities of everyday life, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, London Metropolitan University.

Hills, J., Brewer, M., Jenkins, S., Lister, R., Lupton, R., Machin, S., Mills, C., Modood, T., Rees, T., & Riddell, S. (2010). An Anatomy of economic inequality in the UK: Report of the national equality panel. London: Government Equalities Office/Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.

ISTAT. (2011). I redditi delle famiglie con stranieri, Statistiche Report,22 December 2011.

ISTAT. (2013). La popolazione straniera residente in Italia—Bilancio demografico, Statistiche Report, 26 July 2013.

Jann, B., & Masterson, T. (2007). Anogi: Stata module to generate Analysis of Gini, Available from http://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s456730.html.

Klasen, S., Lechtenfeld, T., & Povel, F. (2011). What about the women? Female headship, poverty and vulnerability in Thailand and Vietnam Poverty, equity and growth discussion paper no. 76, Courant Research Centre.

Knight, J. B., & Sabot, R. H. (1983). Educational expansion and the kuznets effect. American Economic Review, 73, 1132–1136.

Lasswell, T. (1965). Class and stratum. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Longford, N. T., Pittau, M. G., Zelli, R., & Massari, R. (2012). Poverty and inequality in European regions. Journal of Applied Statistics, 39(7), 1557–1576.CrossRef

Maas, W. (2013). Immigrant integration, gender, and citizenship in the Dutch Republic. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 1(3), 390–401.CrossRef

Mathä, T. Y., Porpiglia, A., Sierminska, E. (2011). The immigrant native wealth gap in Germany, Italy and Luxembourg, Working Paper Series, no. 1302/February, 2011, European Central Bank.

McCall, L. (2000). Explaining levels of within-group wage inequality in U.S. labor markets. Demography, 37(4), 415–430.CrossRef

Milanovic, B., & Yitzhaki, S. (2002). Decomposing world income distribution: Does the world have a middle class? Review of Income and Wealth, 2, 155–178.CrossRef

Nielsen, F., & Alderson, A. S. (1997). The Kuznets curve and the great U-turn: Income inequality in U.S. counties, 1970 to 1990. American Sociological Review, 62(1), 12–33.CrossRef

Park, R. E. (1950). Race and culture. Glencoe Illinois: The Free Press.

Platt, L. (2011). Inequality within ethnic groups, JRF programme paper: Poverty and ethnicity. http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/inequality-ethnicity-poverty-full.pdf.

Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of american community. New York: Simon and Schuster.CrossRef

Ratha, D., & Xu, Z. (2008). Migration and remittances factbook. Washington: WorldBank.

Reyneri, E. (2007). Immigration in Italy: Trends and perspectives. Argo: Iom.

Runciman, W. G. (1966). Relative deprivation and social justice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Saraceno, C., Sartor, N., & Sciortino, G. (2013). Stranieri e disuguali. Il Mulino, Bologna: Le disuguaglianze nei diritti e nelle condizioni di vita degli immigrati.

Thomassen, B. (2010). Second generation immigrants’ or ‘Italians with Immigrant Parents’? Italian and European Perspectives on Immigrants and their Children. Bulletin of Italian Politics, 2(1), 21–44.

Uslaner, E. M., & Brown, M. (2005). Inequality, trust and civic engagement. American Politics Research, 33(6), 868–894.CrossRef

Valentova, M., & Berzosa, G. (2012). Attitudes toward immigrants in Luxembourg. Do contacts matter? International Review of Sociology, 22(2), 341–363.

Venturini, A. (1999). Do immigrants working illegally reduce the natives’ legal employment? Evidence from Italy, Journal of Population Economics, 12(1), 135–154.CrossRef

Venturini, A., & Villosio, C. (2006). Labour market effects of immigration into Italy: An empirical analysis. International Labour Review, 145(1-2), 91–118.CrossRef

Venturini, A., & Villosio, C. (2008). Labour-market assimilation of foreign workers in Italy. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 24(3), 517–541.CrossRef

Wolff, E. N., & Zacharias, A. (2013). Class structure and economic inequality. Cambridge Journal of Economics. doi:10.1093/cje/bet026.

World Bank. (2001). World Bank policy research report 2001: Engendering development: Through gender equality in rights, resources, and voice. New York: Oxford University Press.

World Bank. (2008). World development report 2009. Washington, DC: World Bank.CrossRef

Yaya, M. E. (2013). Within inequality characteristics and adaptation of immigrants in the United States. Review of Economics of the Households. doi:10.1007/s11150-013-9233-6.

Yitzhaki, S. (1982). Relative deprivation and economic welfare. European Economic Review, 17, 99–113.CrossRef

Yitzhaki, S. (1994). Economic distance and overlapping of distributions. Journal of Econometrics, 61, 147–159.CrossRef

Yitzhaki, S., & Lerman, R. (1991). income stratification and income inequality. Review of Income and Wealth, 37, 313–329.CrossRef

Yitzhaki, S., & Schechtman, E. (2009). The ‘melting pot’: A success story? Journal of Economic Inequality, 7, 137–151.CrossRef

Titel: Studying Income Inequality of Immigrant Communities in Italy
verfasst von: Antonella D’Agostino
Andrea Regoli
Giancarlo Cornelio
Fabio Berti
Publikationsdatum: 05.04.2015
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 1/2016
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-0954-1

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 1/2016

Are Happier People More Willing to Make Income Sacrifices to Protect the Environment?

How to Make a Newcomer Happy? The Mediating Role of Career Commitment on the Relationship Between Unmet Expectations and Job Satisfaction

Structural Gender Equality in Europe and Its Evolution Over the First Decade of the Twentyfirst Century

Perceptions of the Economic Crisis in Europe: Do Adults in Households with Children Feel a Greater Impact?

How Does Leisure Time Affect Production Efficiency? Evidence from China, Japan, and the US

Linking Social Support to Psychological Distress in the Unemployed: The Moderating Role of Core Self-Evaluations