I’m very grateful to Regional Studies Association for giving me the opportunity to attend to the Warsaw International Economic Meeting 2016 (WIEM 2016), where I presented my work entitled “Ethnic Minority Concentration: A Source of Productivity Growth for Italian Provinces?”.
The aim of my paper was to assess the contribution of ethnic minorities to the productivity of the main Italian sectors. To this end, it has been considered the first ten nationalities by numbers of regularised persons observed at the provincial level (NUTS3) between 2003 and 2011. The effect on productivity of ethnic communities has been explicitly taken into account using an empirical growth model with spatially augmented specifications, which allows to disentangle the effect of each community at the provincial level. The outcomes gave information about the clusterisation patterns of migrants and their effects on productivity, giving room to various policy implications.
During the WIEM 2016 I had the opportunity to meet scholars from all over the world with various backgrounds. This gave me the chance to enlarge my experience and establishing new relationships with various scholars. Many of them found very interesting the opportunities offered from Regional Studies Association. They discovered a new field, regional studies, and they understood that their topics of study can have regional dimension which they did not consider before. Furthermore, they appreciated the large network of Regional Studies Association and the wide range of journals published by RSA.
The participation to WIEM 2016 has been useful also for my professional growth. The level of the participants was very high and I had good feedbacks and suggestions during my presentation. The congress has been very well organized, with parallel and plenary sessions held by professor Heckman and professor Hanley.
To conclude, I can say that this has been a great experience which gave me a lot and that, without the support of RSA, would not have been possible.