Drawing foreign resident population in Italy according to a “local labour market areas” approach

Mauro Albani, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Cinzia Conti, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

“Local labour market areas” represent a privileged framework to show the migrants’ behaviours. This study intends analysing the main characteristics of the foreign population living in Italy and its development over the last few years. The strong relationship between labour market and foreign people distribution suggested us to use “local labour market areas” (LLMAs) to draw the geography of this population across Italy. The 686 LLMAs correspond to aggregations of local administrative units (“comuni”) contiguous one to the other and constitute areas geographically and statistically comparable. To map the different aspects of immigration in Italy, we decided to use the data from the Istat survey on foreign resident population, which provides annual data on resident foreign population disaggregated at a sufficient territorial level. They are collected from the administrative population registers (“anagrafi comunali”), one of the most important official sources on this topic.