Italians’ and Foreigners’ Internal Mobility in Italy: an Application of Gravitational Models

In Italy, between 1995 and 2005, the changes of residence between Italian municipalities increased of nearly 19%. Simultaneously, the contribution of the foreign population to internal migrations reached the level of 14%. Structural factors and a greater propensity to mobility may partly explain the foreign population’s contribution to internal mobility. This work aims at assessing the structural characteristics of internal migrations of the foreign and the Italian population. Besides the classical measures, we adopt a gravitational model which allows to quantify the effects on internal mobility due to the dimension of the populations in the areas of origin and destination and the distance between macro-areas. The estimates obtained for the years 1995, 2000 and 2005, clearly highlights the different behaviours of Italians and foreigners and a different evolution of phenomenon.