The alien character of local economies: micro-entrepreneurship inside the origin-destination matrix

Transcription

1 The alien character of local economies: micro-entrepreneurship inside the origin-destination matrix Franco Lorenzini, Fabio Sforzi and Flavio Verrecchia Abstract. Since the late 1970s, scholars have paid increasingly attention to microentrepreneurship in Italy, together with the acknowledgment of industrial districts as a primary theoretic and empirical approach to local industrial development. Industrial districts approach has explained the dependence of micro-entrepreneurship on the industrial atmosphere of a place. However, little attention has been paid on the origin of microentrepreneurs, and to what extent they are natives or foreigners, who have migrated in the place and have set up their economic activities. Data collected in ASIA-ISTAT archives overcome such lack of information. The aim of this paper is to investigate the structure of local micro-entrepreneurship in order to analyse (a) the extent of its natives/migrants entrepreneurs composition, and (b) which Italian regions and foreign countries such microentrepreneurs come from. The study uses an origin-destination matrix, which connects place of birth of micro-entrepreneurs and the place of localization of their firms. Places are defined on the basis of ISTAT Local Labour Market Areas (LLMAs). Keywords: Micro-entrepreneurship, origin-destination matrix, LLMA. JEL Classification: L26, R23, J Introduction and methods The local structures of micro-entrepreneurship in terms of natives/migrants micro-entrepreneurs composition is the subject of the paper. Places where micro-entrepreneurs have set up their economic activities are defined as Local Labour Market Areas (LLMAs) (Sforzi and Orasi, 2005). The analysis of entrepreneurs characters is particularly relevant with respect to the topic of industrial districts (IDs) because of the importance of intertwined social relations rather than business relations (Sforzi and Lorenzini, 2002). This paper, that aims to study the origin (by birth place of micro-entrepreneurs 12 ) and the destination (by localization) of the national actives entrepreneurs 23, considers as statistical unit the micro-entrepreneur as according to the EU definition 34, excluding the partnerships legal form. 21 The tax code defines the place of birth. 32 Existence, location and state of activity of the entrepreneur are defined by ASIA archive. 43 Self-employment firm, freelance, (free)professional with both less than 10 persons employed and with a turnover less than 2 millions (entrepreneurs excluded: 0.9%) (Commission of the European Communities, 2006). Firms considered: 64%. 1

2 2. Applications: Stars and Saint Lucy Eye draw the typologies The traits of Regions (NUTS2) and LLMAs are defined by two Stars and the eye of Saint Lucy (Fig. 1). They reflect different proportions of the national intensity of the studied phenomena (i.e. Outgoing Indigenes indices - OIi; Foreigners indices - IFi; Aliens indices - IAi), and have to be considered together with the endowments. Figure 1 - Indigenes, Aliens and Foreigners by Regions * and LLMAs, 2007 (indices, Italy=1) * Regions NUTS2. Sources: Data processing on ISTAT-ASIA archive. Without loss of generality, given both the three-ways (i.e. for every LLMA) matrix and the regional origin-destination (O-D) matrix, and the aggregations of interest (i.e. indigenes - natives; aliens - migrants Italians and 2

3 foreigners), the following equations 45 are applicable: IAi i = IA i / IA; IFi i = IF i / IF; OIi j = OI j / OI. From the study of diagonals and marginal of the O-D matrix, some considerations can be synthesized by utilizing the following typologies of Regions and LLMAs (Tab. 1 and 2). Table 1 Indigenes, Aliens and Foreigners by Regions, 2007 (indices, Italy = 1) Regions (NUTS2) Aliens IAi (Italy=1) Outgoing Indigenes OIi (Italy=1) Foreigners IFi (Italy=1) Typologies Campania Sicily Calabria Basilicata Apulia Molise Backward and repulsive Sardinia Close Veneto Abruzzo Trentino-Alto Adige Umbria Close but xenophilous Italy Middling Latium Piedmont Open Aosta Valley Friuli-Venezia Giulia Tuscany Emilia-Romagna Marches Liguria Lombardy Open and xenophilous Source: Data processing on ISTAT-ASIA archive. 54 Where IA i=1-[e ij/(e i. f i)], for i=j; IF i=f i/(e i. f i); OI j=1-(e ij/e.j), for i=j; IA=1- [E (i=j)/(e.. F.)]; IF=F./(E.. F.); OI=1-(E (i=j)/e..); E..= ije ij; F.= if i; E.. F.= ije ij+ if i; E i. f i= je ij+f i; E. j= ie ij; E (i=j)= ij(i=j) e ij; and where F i are entrepreneurs foreigners by birth that work in i-th region, e ij are alien entrepreneurs by birth born in the j-th region and with economic activity in i. 3

4 Table 2 Indigenes, Aliens and Foreigners by LLMAs, 2007 (indices, Italy = 1) LLMAs Aliens IAi (It=1) Outgoing Indigenes OIi (It=1) Foreigners IFi (It=1) Typologies Manufacturing - Industrial districts Open and xenophilous - Industrial poles* Middling Italy Middling Non-manufacturing - Metropolitan areas Open - Other LLMAs Backward and repulsive * LLMAs dominated by large firms. Source: Data processing on ISTAT-ASIA archive. Detected typologies of Regions and LLMAs are: Backward and Repulsive, composed of Other (non-manufacturing) LLMAs and Southern Italian Regions (Campania, Sicilia, Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia and Molise) where it is possible to observe both the alienentrepreneurial (Italian and foreign) lack of attraction and the exodus of the indigenes; Close, the Sardegna that, while arrives to keep the indigenesentrepreneurs, fails to attract aliens-entrepreneurs; Close but Xenophilous, composed of Veneto, Abruzzo, Trentino-Alto Adige, Umbria where it s possible to observe both the lack of nationalentrepreneurial attraction and a foreigner-entrepreneurship attraction; Open, composed of Non-manufacturing Metropolitan LLMAs and of Lazio, Piemonte and Valle D Aosta; Open and Xenophilous, composed, on the contrary, of IDs and, among Regions, particularly, those that form the historic core of the Third Italy (Toscana, Emilia and Marche) and the Old Industrial Triangle (Lombardia). 3. Conclusions While considering the limitations of secondary use of administrative data, and the absence, in this experiment, of the specific quality control on 4

5 demographic characteristics, from the analysis performed some first original results emerge (Fig. 1). The working-class culture intrinsic to district entrepreneurs (Brusco and Paba, 1997) and the amount of aliens in the industrial districts (i.e. index = 1.2, Tab. 2), if taken together, are an example among others of the prospects of research on the evolution of IDs. Finally, it should be noted, that the empirical exercise proposed has been possible thanks to the existence of the ASIA archive (Martini, 1995; Cella et al., 2007) and from the emergence of a new ISTAT approach i.e. interconnected system of archives (Mancini, 2010). In fact, if a given population of entrepreneurs is a necessary precondition, a new approach which considers workers as a statistical unit in addition to firms is essential for quantitative analysis of business and demographic characteristics. References Brusco, S. e Paba, S. 1997, Per una storia dei distretti industriali italiani dal secondo dopoguerra agli anni novanta, in F. Barca, a cura di, Storia del capitalismo italiano, Roma, Donzelli, pp Cella, P., Laureti, T., Rossetti, S. and Viviano, C. 2007, New successful entrepreneurs in Italy: a statistical portrait, in Actes du colloque «Entrepreneuriat: Nouveaux défis, nouveaux comportements», Co-organisé par l ESCEM et l ISC Paris avec la collaboration de l Université de Sherbrooke, Québec et de l University College of Cork, Irlande sous le patronage du Parlement Européen, Paris, 11 Juin, Cahier de la Recherche de l ISC - CRISC n. 17, pp Commission of the European Communities 2006, Report from the Commission on: The implementation of the Commission recommendation (2003/361/EC) of 6 may 2003 concerning the definition of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, Brussels, C(2006)7074. Mancini, A. 2010, Il censimento delle imprese: una strategia basata su registri statistici assistiti da rilevazioni campionarie, ISTAT workshop on Censimenti 2011: contenuti, metodologie e innovazioni organizzative, Roma, 9 November. Martini, M. 1995, Necessità e possibilità di un registro statistico delle imprese in Italia, in M. Martini e S. Biffignandi, a cura di, Il registro statistico europeo delle imprese: esperienze e metodi per la sua costruzione in Italia, Milano, Franco Angeli, pp Sforzi, F. and Lorenzini, F. 2002, I distretti industriali, in IPI-Ministero delle Attività Produttive, L esperienza italiana dei distretti industriali, Roma, pp

6 Sforzi, F. and Orasi, A. 2005, a cura di, I sistemi locali del lavoro 2001, Istat, 21 luglio 2005 <dawinci.istat.it/dawinci/jsp/md/download/sll_comunicato.pdf>. Contact Address: Franco Lorenzini, Flavio Verrecchia, DICA - ISTAT, Viale Oceano Pacifico Roma, Italy; lorenzin@istat.it; verrecchia@istat.it Fabio Sforzi, Department of Economics, University of Parma, Via J.F. Kennedy Parma, Italy; fabio.sforzi@unipr.it 6