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

Since the late 1970s, scholars have paid increasingly attention to micro-entrepreneurship 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 micro-entrepreneurs, 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 micro-entrepreneurs 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).