Can regional policies shape migration flows?

Anno
2018
Proponente Guido Pellegrini - Professore Ordinario
Sottosettore ERC del proponente del progetto
Componenti gruppo di ricerca
Abstract

Europe is recently welcoming a large flow of migrants, mostly from the Asian countries and the southern Mediterranean coast. European policy makers need the tools to understand and manage these migration flows, in order to operationalize the complex adjustment process of immigrants with the economic and social context of European regions. We propose to develop a theoretical model, that explains how two groups of regions, which differ in productivity and public good endowments, compete in tax and public goods for attracting or rejecting migrants. In our framework the less productive regions receive public transfers which increase their panoply of public goods. The model should show that whenever public transfers are sufficiently high, migration to the less productive regions is observed only in the case when the productivity gap between regions is not extremely wide. We want to empirically test the model using a regression discontinuity design to empirically assess the causal relationship between the reception of large amount of public funds - generally spent to finance health, infrastructure and public service investments - and migration flows in the EU-15 regions. We expect a wide expansion in the share of foreign citizens in the high-subsidized regions, when compared to low-subsidized regions with similar pre-treatment characteristics. Our model suggests that previous empirical studies might have underestimated the importance of public goods and services in attracting immigrants. We argue that the use of detailed data at regional level and the adoption of an evaluation strategy which allowed to convincingly isolate the role of public goods and services from economic factors can improve the analysis of the impact of the European Regional Policy on migration flows.

ERC
SH2_9, SH1_2, SH1_13
Keywords:
METODI E STRUMENTI DELLA VALUTAZIONE, MIGRAZIONI, ECONOMIA URBANA, RURALE E REGIONALE, INTEGRAZIONE EUROPEA, MODELLI STATISTICI

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