Ethnic Minority Concentration : A Source of Productivity Growth for Italian Provinces?

This paper aims at assessing the contribution of ethnic minorities to the productivity of the main sectors of Italian provinces. To this end, we consider the first ten nationalities by numbers of regularised persons observed at the provincial level (NUTS-3) between 2003 and 2011. We use an empirical panel growth model with spatially augmented specifications, which allows to capture both the direct (marginal) and indirect (spillover) effects of each community on local productivity at the provincial level. Our findings show that two communities out of ten have a positive impact on economic performance of Italian provinces. Other foreign groups have significant effects only indirectly, meaning that these groups do not affect growth of provinces where they live, but the neighbouring provinces likely because of commuting