Material deprivation among foreigners in Italy

Anna Maria Milito, Università degli Studi di Palermo
Philippe Van Kerm, CEPS/INSTEAD
Annalisa Busetta, Università degli Studi di Palermo
Daria Mendola, Università degli Studi di Palermo

In all European countries, migrant populations tend to have worse living conditions than native; this is particularly true for those born outside the EU. This paper proposes a new way to look at the relative living conditions of foreigners by looking at non-monetary (or ‘direct’) indicators of material deprivation in Italy-a country characterized by the presence of a wide range of nationalities. To examine differences in economic integration of foreigners, the paper documents deprivation differentials across groups of foreigners. In particular, we measure differences in material deprivation between groups of foreigners once we control for the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of each group using a flexible standardization methodology. Our results show that, in Italy, foreigners from African and Mediterranean countries and to a lesser extend from South Asia are most deprived and that the construction of the counterfactual distributions (considering age, gender, household composition, education, labor market position, household income, tenancy status and integration) only marginally explain the gap between different foreigner groups.