Bilateral data on migrant stocks for the period 2005-11, collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) from the population registers of Italian municipalities, represent the stock of the foreign population resident in each Italian province, by citizenship, at the beginning of each year. Data on the age structure of the foreign resident population in each province are unavailable. Instead, in the robustness section we use the total growth rate of the number of migrants over 2005-11 in each province as a measure of how recently established a migrant community is. The data refer to the number of official foreign residents, and do not account for undocumented migrants residing in Italy.

For each recipient country, GDP at constant prices for the period 1950-2012 is drawn from the IMF _World Economic Outlook_ database. The cyclical and trend components are extracted using the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Data on total population for the period 2005-11, as well as the level of financial development, proxied by domestic credit to private sector as a share of GDP, are drawn from the _World Development Indicators_ database.

The annual frequency of natural disasters is drawn from the _International Emergency Disasters_ database (EM-DAT) built by the _Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters_ .<sup>13</sup> Data on armed conflicts are drawn from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset (Themnér and Wallensteen, 2013).<sup>14</sup> The terms of trade are drawn from the IMF _World Economic Outlook_ database.

For each province, real GDP for the period 1995-2010 is drawn from ISTAT and the _Istituto Guglielmo Tagliacarne_ .<sup>15</sup> The cyclical and trend components are again extracted using the HodrickPrescott filter. Data on total provincial population for the period 2005-2011 are provided by ISTAT. The number of bank branches is provided by the Bank of Italy.<sup>16</sup>

# **4 Descriptive analysis**

## **4.1 Remittances from Italy to Developing Countries**

Total remittances from Italy to developing countries doubled between 2005 and 2011, reaching almost e 7 billion, in line with the growth in the stock of foreign residents in Italy (Figure 2). After 2007, however, the growth rate of remittances slowed down significantly, reflecting the impact of the global financial crisis and of the euro area crisis on Italian output and unemployment. Indeed, remittances declined in 2010, although 2011 saw a rapid recovery, consistent with the global pattern of international remittances (Figure 1, right panel).

The geographic distribution of remittances from Italy largely mimics the global distribution,

> 13 The data are accessible at www.cred.be/emdat/. A disaster is defined as a “situation or event, which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to national or international level for external assistance”. Formally, an event is classified as a disaster whenever it fulfills at least one out of four selection criteria: ten or more people killed; 100 or more people affected, injured or homeless following the disaster; declaration of a state of emergency; or calls for international assistance. See www.emdat.be/criteria-and-definition.

> 14The most recent version (4-2013) is available at www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed _conflict_dataset/.

> 15Data from ISTAT cover the period 1995-2007 while those from _Istituto Guglielmo Tagliacarne_ go from 2007 to 2010. The two series hence overlap in two years, highlighting minor differences.

> 16Data on the provincial presence of money-transfer operators, which could represent a better measure of the access of migrants to remittance-transfer services, are not publicly available for the period of the analysis.

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