Long‐run trends in internal migrations in italy: a study in panel cointegration with dependent units

Abstract

SUMMARYThe objective of this paper is to examine the long-run determinants of internal migrations from southern Italy. In order to accomplish this task, the paper develops a bootstrap test for panel cointegration analysis with dependent units. Monte Carlo simulations show that the test, based on the Continuous-Path Block bootstrap, has good power and size properties and is robust to both short-and long-run dependence across units. The empirical analysis points to income in the sending region as a key factor of the decline of migrations, with unemployment and income differentials playing only a minor role.

Interne Migration, regionale Arbeitsmarktdynamik und Implikationen für Ost-West-Disparitäten: Ergebnisse auf Basis einer Panel VAR Analyse

“…This result is in line with earlier evidence given in Alecke & Untiedt (2000) as well as Fachin (2007) for the Italian case. However, during the second wave of East-West migration with its peak around 2001 this relationship is reversed resulting higher actual net outflows than predicted values based on the included structural labour market parameters.…”

“…Only for Italian data Daveri & Faini (1998) point at a more prominent role given to regional wage levels in explaining gross out-migration from southern to northern regions. Similar evidence is also reported in Fachin (2007) for long-run trends of Italian South-North migration. The author finds that income growth in the origin region is a significant driving force of migration, while unemployment rates have only weak effects.…”

Interregional Migration and Thresholds: Evidence from Spain

“…Antolin and Bover (1997) conclude that the unemployment rate has no significant effect on international migration and show that emigration occurs from regions where wages are higher than the average, which seems to contradict many of the theoretical findings. These conflicting conclusions are not only observed for the case of Spain, since Italian internal migrations do not react to mass unemployment, as Fachin (2007) found, nor to an increase in GDP, as determined by Biagi and Faggian (2011). Figure 1 shows the evolution of gross internal emigration and the unemployment rate, in the extended period 1988-2010, confirming that the lower the unemployment rate in Spain, the higher the interregional gross migration rate.…”

Does knowledge spill over across borders and technology regimes?

“…We test for the null hypothesis of no cointegration following a methodology proposed in the recent work of Fachin (2007). This study introduces block-bootstrapped versions of the well known panel cointegration test of 12 The advantage of the panel data approach is that it enables us to determine the long-run relation among variables avoiding well-known problems that occur in using traditional time series cointegration testing (i.e., lower power of statistics due to small sample sizes).…”

“…As Davidson and MacKinnon (2000, p. 7) point out, ''it is almost costless to compute FDB2 if FDB1 is already being computed, it may be useful to do so as a check on the accuracy of the latter.'' In the original paper, Fachin (2007) shows the validity of the bootstrapped versions of the cointegration tests via Monte-Carlo simulations, but recently Palm et al (2008) have demonstrated theoretically that the bootstrap approach behaves adequately in such a framework. The bootstrapped versions of the group-t and median-t statistics for the null hypothesis of no cointegration are robust to cross-sectional dependence and small sample bias.…”