The impact of immigration on output and its components: a sectoral analysis for Italy at regional level

This paper studies the impact of immigrant workers on Italian sectors. The analysis is based on the channel output decomposition approach, by means of which the effect of immigration is measured with respect to per capita value added and its components. The empirical investigation is carried out at sector level during the period 2008–2011. The results show that immigrants exert a positive impact on total output which is mainly driven by the effect on total factor productivity. The main finding is that not all sectors benefit from the productivity gains. The sectors that mostly take advantage of immigrant workers are those featured by the predominance of manual tasks not requiring high communication skills.