Skills and wage differences between native and foreign workers in Italy

Abstract

For several years, immigration has been one of the topics at the centre of the Italian media and political debate and has become a structural component of society and the economy. This paper aims to make a contribution to analysing the wage differences between Italians and foreigners in the Italian labour market in terms of the content of occupations. Several studies in the literature suggest that natives respond to immigration by specialising in occupations in which they have a comparative advantage over foreigners. Through the construction of a series of composite indicators, representing the content of occupations, the wage gap between Italian and foreign workers was analysed in order to identify the factors that most determine the observed gap. In this analysis, the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition was used as a statistical model and the study was conducted through statistical matching between the Labour Force Survey (research file, year 2019) of ISTAT and the Sample Survey on Occupations (year 2013) carried out jointly by ISTAT and INAPP.