Family Origin and Early School Leaving in Italy: The Long-Term Effects of Internal Migration

The proportion of early school leavers in Italy is high by European Union standards. However, it is not uniformly distributed across the country: in Southern regions, it is almost double than in Centre-Northern area. This chapter goes beyond descriptive e

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Family Origin and Early School Leaving in Italy: The Long-Term Effects of Internal Migration Carmen Aina, Giorgia Casalone, and Paolo Ghinetti

Abstract The proportion of early school leavers in Italy is high by European Union standards. However, it is not uniformly distributed across the country: in Southern regions, it is almost double than in Centre-Northern area. This chapter goes beyond descriptive evidence and examines the conditional probability of leaving school with (at most) the compulsory schooling certificate in Italy using seven waves of Bank of Italy’s SHIW data, covering individuals born in the period from 1979 to 1995. Among various determinants, we focus on the role played by family origin. Our results show that youths born in the Centre-North with both parents from Southern Italy (second generation internal migrants) behave similarly to youths born and living in the South, so that they are more likely to drop out school earlier than comparable individuals born in the Centre-North with parents from the same area (natives). When only the household head is from the South, second generation migrants are similar to natives and the assimilation with native born in terms of schooling choices at the age of 14 is complete. Differences in family characteristics (education, financial conditions) are able to account for a large share of raw differences in education decisions between individuals born in Centre-North vs. South, as well as between natives and second generation migrants born in the Centre-North of Italy. The analysis of these dynamics over time shows that differences across groups of youths defined by their origin narrow since the mid2000. Keywords Internal migration • Education JEL Classification J24, R23

C. Aina () • G. Casalone • P. Ghinetti Department of Economics and Business Studies, University of Eastern Piedmont, Via Perrone 18, 28100 Novara, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 C. Mussida, F. Pastore (eds.), Geographical Labor Market Imbalances, AIEL Series in Labour Economics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-55203-8_11

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11.1 Introduction Three important characteristics of the Italian society are the persistently high rates of early school leavers, the impressive youth unemployment rates and the massive migration flows from the poorer Southern regions to the richer Northern ones occurred in the last century. In Italy schooling drop-out rates are substantially higher than in many other countries at any educational level. Even among young generations, there is still a relatively high fraction of population who do not continue after compulsory schooling or who leave education during the secondary cycle. According to Eurostat (2012), Italy ranks third (after Portugal and Spain) among European Union Countries in terms of early school leavers share (Table 11.1).1 Notwithstanding the remarkable reduction occurred in the last 10 years, one-fifth of the Italian young people in the 18–24 age class drop education after having obtained the c