Material deprivation among foreigners in Italy

Abstract

In all European countries, migrant populations tend to have worse living conditions than native; this is particularly true for those born outside the EU. This paper proposes a new way to look at the relative living conditions of foreigners by looking at non-monetary indicators of material deprivation in Italy. In particular, we discuss differences in material deprivation among groups of foreigners once we control for the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of each group using a flexible standardization methodology. Our results show that, in Italy, foreigners from African and Mediterranean countries and, to a lesser extent, from South Asia are most deprived and that the construction of the counterfactual distributions only marginally explain the gap between different foreigner groups.