Italian people abroad: problems and methods

Angela Silvestrini, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Giovanni Cariani, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Pier Paolo Pace, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

During the long history of Italian migration abroad, many attempt of measuring its consistency have been done, through different sources and methods, using flow and stock data. Nowadays the Italian National Institute for Statistics collects administrative data from every Italian Municipality on migrations (flows data). Italian sources of data on the stock of Italian population resident abroad are based on two different sources: civil registers in each municipality and civil registers in each Consular Office. We have elaborated the second source of data, after a deep process of statistic correction in order to eliminate duplications, missing and wrong data. This work will present the results of the analysis on data from Consular Civil Registers at 21st march 2003. In these registers are listed all the Italians that voluntary registered themselves, living abroad for almost one year. At that date there were more than 3millions and 8 hundred Italian people living in another country. The Italian presence is strongly concentrated in 12 countries: five European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Switzerland), two North American countries (Canada and USA), four South American ones (Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Uruguay) and Australia. The remaining 10 per cent lives in many other countries, and particularly in Europe and South America. The structure of the pyramid of ages presents the history of Italian migration abroad. The main demographic characters of Italians living abroad change from county to country. There is a deep relation between the place of origin and the place of destination. We will underline these relations and differences.