Abstract

After having been object of several studies, the analysis of internal migration in Italy decreased since the 80s and the 90s. The most important reasons that could explain this lack of interest are probably related to the quantitative reduction of internal geographical mobility and to the consistent international migration fluxes that started to move towards Italy. Anyway, recently some scholars have got back to study the Italian internal migration because the inter-regional mobility rates are increasing again. These studies claimed that the demographic and skill composition of migrants has changed with respect to the so-called «great migration»: it means that, in contrast to what happened in the 60s and 70s, current South-North migrants are the youngest and the most highly educated. The objectives of this work are twofold: the former is to make clearer the theoretical debate on this topic through the statistical analysis of longitudinal data; the latter is to compare the internal migration of the 60s and 70s with the more recent one, studying how the individual characteristics of internal migrants changed over time.