Are The Effects on Regional Growth of Intra-National and Inter-National Skill-Specific Immigration Flows Different?

The paper analyses the effects of international and internal migration, broken down by educational level, on the growth dynamics of the Italian provinces over the period 2004-2012. On the theoretically supported grounds that these effects might be different, even conflicting, depending on the educational level and the internal/international nature of the immigration flows, we implement a system-gmm estimator and show that in all the considered cases the highly-educated interprovincial immigrants foster economic growth in the destination province. Evidence of a positive role is also found for the international low-skilled immigration, while interprovincial flows of poorly educated people have a detrimental effect on the gdp per capita.