Foreign Immigration and pull factors in Italy : a spatial approach

Significant changes have affected currently internal mobility in Italy. We try to understand what are the variables that allow a place to attract population. This work focuses on the foreign population and aims to detect the factors that push immigrant population towards Italian municipalities. We want to verify whether the action is different between movements of foreigners already resident in Italy and of immigrants coming directly from abroad. Data on flows, stock of populations and socioeconomic variables on Italian municipalities from Istat, Ministry of Economy and Sole 24 were exploited. Methods used are regression analyses enriched with spatial factors with reference to the possible action of spatial variables through the building of OLS, spatial lag and spatial error models.