Abstract
Differences in human capital endowment between the standard partition of Italy (North–South) are pronounced. The divide between urban and rural areas is even more remarkable, with the former showing also faster accumulation rate. Using data from civil registries and survey on graduates, we show that mobility plays a crucial role in explaining this accumulation gap. Urban areas of the North drain human capital from rural and urban locations of the South, but they lose graduates in favor of foreign countries. Urban movers are positively selected according to familiar background and secondary school grades. Moreover, in comparison to stayers, they are more likely to hold a university degree associated with better labour market prospects. Migrations of graduates are responsive to labour market conditions, to university supply, to house prices and—most importantly—to local human capital endowment.
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Notes
See, for instance, Brunello et al. (2000) for a discussion on the determinants of low attainment in Italy.
A urban center is a municipality or an aggregation of municipalities with high population density (i.e. not less than 1500 inhabitants for each square kilometer).
The share of population living in an urban LLM is in line with the one living in urban agglomerations as defined by OECD (2014).
In some cases, we divide (formal) mobility flows to the stock of human capital available in a specific area and year, in order to obtain migration rates. In that cases, the stock at the denominator is recovered using data on educational attainment obtained from the LFS.
Observations have been weighted using LLM population. All data used in the analysis of variance have been obtained from 2011 Census. The share of graduates is calculated on the population aged 6 or more, which is shown in Table 1.
Different factors may affect the natural growth: for instance, it can be higher in areas where education is already more widespread and intergenerational mobility of education is low, as in Italy (Checchi et al. 1999). Academic supply may also play a role, reducing the cost of acquiring education and the demand for qualified labor. Demographic factors affect the natural growth production, too: the urban population is younger and thus the potential inflow in the stock of tertiary educated bigger.
Notice that migration rates calculated using population at the end of the period, \( {pop_{t = T}} \) could not take into account differences in demographic trends (which are captured by the residual term of the decomposition). In particular, this turns out to overestimate (underestimate) the migration rate in rural (urban) areas of the South, which displayed totally different demographic trends over the time span under scrutiny. Migration rates in Fig. 3 are free from this potential distortion.
In 2016, more the 44% of graduates’ total flows towards urban areas are directed to the main municipality of the LLM.
The reference population is calculated as a half of the sum of the population of LLM i and LLM j.
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Ballatore, R.M., Mariani, V. Human Capital Differentials Across Urban and Rural Areas in Italy. The Role of Migrations. Ital Econ J 5, 307–324 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-019-00098-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-019-00098-9