Migration, labor tasks and production structure

We assess the effect of migrants’ stock on the production structure of the Italian provinces (NUTS3) in 1995–2006. Although the investigated time span is very short, the effect is small but statistically significant: a doubling in the ratio of foreign-born residents to the province population induces a significant increase in manufactures’ value added with respect to services’ value added between 12 and 21 per cent. These effects are more intense when considering an increase in foreign-born populations drawn from countries more different to Italy (in terms of GDP per capita and educational attainment). These results are compatible with the reduced form of a two-sector model where we assume that production is performed with one mobile factor and two sector-specific CES labor composites of simple and complex tasks. If migrants and natives have different productivity when performing simple or complex tasks, an inflow of migrants induces production restructuring in favor of the simple-task intensive sector.