Assessing the Effect of Discrimination on Perceived Wellbeing of Immigrants in Italy: A Counterfactual Approach

Maria Gabriella Campolo, Università di Messina
Antonio Di Pino , Università di Messina

In this study we aim to evaluate how the status of citizenship, for the immigrants in Italy, influences their perception of wellbeing, including both cognitive and emotional domain. To this end, analysing the Eusilc-Italy data, we try to disentangle the effect of discrimination due to the citizenship status from the effect of the individual skills on the individual wellbeing. In doing this, we follow a counterfactual approach by applying the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. As a result, we found that the difference in wellbeing perception between immigrants and natives, favourable to the latter, is not determined, with prevalence, by the individual skills and by the related “reference labour income”, but it mainly depends on a discrimination effect due to the citizenship status.

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 Presented in Session 86. Health and Wellbeing of Migrants