The Effectiveness of Immigration Policies

This article elaborates a conceptual framework for assessing the character and effectiveness of immigration policies. It argues that, to a considerable extent, the public and academic controversy concerning this issue is spurious because of fuzzy definitions of policy effectiveness, stemming from confusion between (1) policy discourses, (2) policies on paper, (3) policy implementation, and (4) policy impacts. The article distinguishes three policy gaps: the discrepancy between public discourses and policies on paper (discursive gap); the disparity between policies on paper and implemented policies (implementation gap); and the extent to which implemented policies affect migration (efficacy gap). Although implemented policies seem to be the correct yardstick to assess policy effectiveness, in practice the (generally more pronounced) discourses are often used as a benchmark. This can lead to an overestimation of policy failure. Existing empirical studies suggest that policies significantly affect the targeted migration flows, but they crucially fail to assess the relative importance of policies in comparison to other migration determinants, including non‐migration policies, as well as the hypothetical occurrence of unintended categorical, spatial, inter‐temporal, and reverse flow “substitution” effects. Evidence on such effects is still scarce, showing the need for more empirically informed insights about the short‐ and long‐term effects of migration policies.     

Consequences of Family Policies on Childbearing Behavior: Effects or Artifacts?

This article argues for a more careful consideration of theoretical and methodological approaches in studies of the effects of public policies, labeled here as family policies, on childbearing behavior. We employ elements of comparative welfare‐state research, of the sociology of “constructed categories,” and of “the new institutionalism” to demonstrate that investigations into policy effects need to contextualize policies and need to reduce their complexity by focusing on “critical junctures,”“space,” and “uptake.” We argue that the effects of family policies can only be assessed properly if we study their impact on individual behavior. Event‐history models applied to individual‐level data are the state‐of‐the‐art of such an approach. We use selected empirical studies from Sweden to demonstrate that the type of approach that we advocate prevents us from drawing misleading conclusions.     

Do family caps reduce out-of-wedlock births? Evidence from Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, New Jersey and Virginia

During the 1990s, 23 states implemented family cap policies as a means to reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births among welfare recipients. Using Current Population Survey data from 1989 to 1999, we examine the impact of family cap policies on the birth rates of single, less-educated women with children. We use the first five states that were granted waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services to implement family caps as “natural experiments.” Specifically, we compare trends in out-of-wedlock birth rates in Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, New Jersey and Virginia to trends in states that did not implement family caps or any other waivers prior to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. We employ several techniques to increase the credibility of results from our “natural experiment,” such as the inclusion of multiple comparison groups, controls for differential time trends, and “difference-in-difference-in-differences” estimators. Our regression estimates generally do not provide evidence that family cap policies reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births among single, less-educated women with children.     

A Population Policy Rationale for the Twenty‐First Century

I propose that the primary goal of twenty‐first‐century population policies should be to strengthen the human resource base for national and global sustainable development. I discuss the shortcomings of the three dominant twentieth‐century population policy rationales: acceptance of replacement‐level fertility as a demographic goal; realizing a “demographic dividend” from the changing age structure; and filling the “unmet need” for family planning. I demonstrate that in all three cases the explicit incorporation of education into the model changes the picture and makes female education a key population policy priority. Population policies under this new rationale could be viewed as public human resource management. I argue that 20 years after the Cairo ICPD the international community needs a new rationale for population policies in the context of sustainable development and that a focus on human capital development, in particular education and health, is the most promising approach.     

Population in the UN Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook 2000

Most specialized agencies in the United Nations system have taken to compiling a periodic status report on their field. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) issued the first in a proposed biennial series in 1998, titled Global Environment Outlook‐1 or GEO‐1. The second in the series, Global Environment Outlook 2000, was published in 1999. GEO‐2000 is described by the UNEP's Executive Director, Klaus Töpfer, in the foreword as “a comprehensive integrated assessment of the global environment at the turn of the millennium… [and] a forward‐looking document, providing a vision into the 21st century.” Its status, however, is rendered uncertain by the printed caution that “The contents of this volume do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UNEP or contributory organizations.” GEO‐2000 paints a generally bleak picture of environmental trends. It evidences a wide array of particulars (“In the Southern Ocean, the Patagonian toothfish is being over‐fished and there is a large accidental mortality of seabirds caught up in fishing equipment”), but perhaps of more import are its statements about the root causes of environmental problems and what must be done. The excerpts below reflect some of these general views as they pertain to population. They are taken from the section entitled “Areas of danger and opportunity” in Chapter 1 of the report, and from the section “Tackling root causes” in Chapter 5. High resource consumption, fueled by affluent, Western lifestyles, is seen as a basic cause of environmental degradation. Cutting back this consumption will be required, freeing up resources for development elsewhere. Materialist values associated with urban living are part of the problem, given the concentration of future population growth in cities. And “genuine globalization” will entail free movement of people as well as capital and goods, thus optimizing “the population to environmental carrying capacity.” Some of these positions are at least questionable: the supposed “innate environmental sensitivity of people raised on the land or close to nature,” or the aim of “globalization of population movements.” The latter does not appear in the recommendations, perhaps because of an implicit assumption that the effect of open borders on environmental trends is unlikely to be favorable. (For an earlier statement of the same sentiment—from 1927—see the comments by Albert Thomas, first director of the ILO, reproduced in the Archives section of PDR 9, no. 4.)     

Report of the Global Commission on International Migration

In December 2003, “acting on the encouragement of UN Secretary‐General Kofi Annan,” the Global Commission on International Migration was established as an independent body, consisting of 19 Commissioners co‐chaired by Jan O. Carlsson, former Minister for Migration and Development, Sweden, and Mamphela Ramphele, formerly the World Bank's Managing Director, from South Africa. The mandate of the Commission was to “provide the framework for the formulation of a coherent, comprehensive and global response to the issue of international migration.” The work of the Commission was assisted by a Geneva‐based Secretariat and a “Core Group of States,” eventually including 32 governments from all world regions, that acted as an informal consultative body to the Commission. (The United States, the most important host country to immigrants, was not among the 32.) In October 2005, in New York, the Commission presented its Report to Kofi Annan, the UN member states, and other interested bodies. The Report is also intended as an input to intergovernmental discussion of international migration issues at the UN General Assembly in the Fall of 2006. The Report, an 88‐page document, is accessible at « http://www.gcim.org ». That web site also provides access to extensive background materials on selected topics concerning international migration, regional studies of international migration prepared for the Commission, and reports of the regional hearings, consultations with “stakeholders,” and expert meetings held by the Commission. Reproduced below are three sections of the Report: its Introduction (titled “Dimensions and dynamics of international migration”) and two of its four Annexes: “Principles for Action and Recommendations,” and a compendium of data: “Migration at a glance.” Under the impact of globalization, international migration, long an important element of demographic change as experienced by individual states, has acquired increasing salience in international relations and in domestic politics. National sovereignty in deciding about immigration policy (probably the key determinant of contemporary international migration flows) remains an established principle in international law, subject only to treaty obligations to admit bonafide refugees. Increasingly in recent years, however, demands have surfaced to treat such policies as matters to be decided bilaterally between sending and receiving countries, or even to be regulated by an international or supranational body. (For earlier voices discussing this topic see the Archives section of this issue and the Archives section of the December 1983 issue of PDR:“On the international control of migration.”) Unexpectedly to some observers, the Report of the Global Commission fell short of recommending establishment of a new, WTO‐like, international organization within the UN system with responsibility for international migration. It recommends, instead, steps to be taken toward an Inter‐agency Global Migration Facility. Whether or not such arrangements will materialize and be influential, the Commission clearly sees international migration flows, primarily from less developed to more developed countries, as increasing in the future. While not quantified, this vision contrasts with the assumptions incorporated in the often‐cited projections of the UN Population Division, which envisage future net migratory flows as either constant in size or even decreasing. The Report's argument rests primarily on the perceived economic benefits of migration to both receiving and sending countries, fueled by persisting income differentials and by contrasting demographic configurations between migrants' places of origin and destination. It gives short shrift to arguments that question the economic gains of mass migration to receiving countries, or that see such gains at best as minor and likely to be counterbalanced by noneconomic considerations. Nor does the Report gauge the likelihood that heeding its strictures for a more welcoming treatment of migrants would increase the incentives to migrate.     

The United Nations on Levels and Trends of International Migration and Related Policies

Issues of international migration are drawing increasing attention not only from governments and their national constituencies but also from international organizations, notably from various components of the United Nations system. Better understanding of the causes of the flows of international migration and their relationship with development and answers to policy questions arising therefrom are, however, hampered by scarcity of up‐to‐date and reliable quantitative information concerning international migration. As a step toward remedying this gap, in March 2003 the Population Division of the United Nations issued a report, presumably the first of a series, titled International Migration Report 2002. A review essay by David Coleman discussing this publication appears in the book review section of the present issue of PDR. The bulk of this 323‐page document presents statistical profiles for more than 200 countries and territories and also for various regional aggregates. These summaries provide data or estimates (when available or feasible) on population, migrant stock, refugees, and remittances by migrant workers for 1990 and 2000, and on average annual net migration flows for 1990–95 and 1995–2000. These profiles also offer characterization of government views on policies relating to levels of immigration and emigration. According to the report, the total number of international migrants—those residing in a country other than where they were born—was 175 million in 2000, or about 3 percent of the world population. In absolute terms, this global number is about twice as large as it was in 1970, and exceeds the 1990 estimate by some 21 million. The introductory chapters of the report discuss problems in measuring international migration and summarize major trends in international migration policies since the mid‐1970s. An additional chapter reproduces a recent report of the Secretary‐General to the United Nations General Assembly on international migration. Reproduced below is much of the “Overview” section of the report (pp. 1–5). In addition to its published form (New York: United Nations, 2002, ST/ESA/SER.A/220), the full report is accessible on the Internet: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/ittmig2002/ittmigrep2002.htm     

An Italian Statement on International Migration

Increasing realization of the implications of persisting below‐replacement fertility in Europe—shrinking absolute numbers combined with a rising proportion of the elderly—is giving new salience to policy considerations regarding immigration in the countries most affected by low fertility. The recent United Nations report on “replacement migration” (see the Documents section in the June 2000 PDR) highlighted the issue through illustrative calculations showing the size of immigrant streams that would be needed for achieving specified demographic targets in selected lowfertility countries, given continuation of present fertility and mortality trends. For example, the UN report suggested that in Italy—which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world—maintaining a constant population over time would require a net influx of some 12.6 million immigrants during the next 50 years, and maintaining a constant labor forceage population (ages 15–64) would require a net inflow of 18.6 million. Yet immigration policy in Western Europe has become increasingly restrictive during the last quartercentury, and the official policy stance that regulating immigration is strictly within the domain of a country's sovereign right has been assiduously maintained. (International treaty obligations qualify that right in the case of bona fide asylum seekers; however, the definition of that category is also subject to the discretion of the receiving countries.) Thus, although within the European Union national borders are open to EU citizens, the power of regulating immigration from outside the EU is retained by the individual countries rather than subject to EU‐wide decisions. Suggestions coming from the developing countries to follow up the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development with an intergovernmental conference on international migration and development were set aside by the potential immigrant‐receiving countries as overly contentious. A statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy, Lamberto Dini, delivered at the 55th General Assembly of the United Nations, 13 September 2000, may be a sign of a notable shift in official approaches to immigration policy by at least one EU member state. The statement, in a departure from the practice of touching lightly upon a wide range of issues in international affairs, typical in high‐level ministerial speeches given at that UN forum, is devoted essentially to a single topic: international migration. It characterizes migration “between or within continents” as an international problem and advocates “coordinated and integrated” instruments in seeking a solution. It suggests that “today, with a declining birth rate and an aging population, Europe needs a strategy that embraces the complex process of integrating people from different regions of the world.” The rules for international migration, the statement claims, should be set in a global framework, such as provided by the United Nations. In the “age of globalization,”“a solidarity pact is needed to find the best and most effective way of balancing the supply and demand of labor.” With the omission of opening and closing ceremonial passages and a brief comment on the problem of debt relief, the statement is reproduced below.     

Science,Modernity, and the Making of China's One‐Child Policy

China's one‐child‐per‐couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one‐child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world‐in‐crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core—that China faced a virtual “population crisis” and that the one‐child policy was “the only solution” to it—as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge‐making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself.     

The US Decennial Census: Political Questions,Scientific Answers

The US decennial census was initiated in 1790 to facilitate nation‐building tasks, especially that of reconfiguring political representation as the population grew and settled new territories. To this basic task of power distribution have been added other key governmental functions, such as the use of census data in guiding revenue sharing and in the enforcement of nondiscriminatory policies. Throughout its history the census has been the focus of partisan clashes. Following the identification of the “differential undercount” a measure of how census coverage differs across demographic groups and geographic areas–the partisan battles intensified, and in recent decades have come to focus not just on how the census counts are used but how the census data are collected. It has been argued that census methodology could be designed to predetermine given partisan outcomes, and for the 2000 census this charge shifted from “could be” to “is.” The Census Bureau has taken extraordinary steps to demonstrate that no partisan considerations have affected the design or implementation of the census, and that its decisions are based solely on the best technical judgment available.     

Lesbians Bait the Military

This article analyzes the racial and sexual politics of the “don't ask, don't tell” storyline on Showtime's series The L Word. It situates The L Word within a political economy of media industry and policy advocacy organizations to argue that the show participated in a form of “policy-tainment” by producing critique of both existing government policies and the role of racial representations in oppositional political strategies, and finally exercising influence in policy networks.     

Family Policies and the Western European Fertility Divide: Insights from a Natural Experiment in Belgium

Countries in Northwestern Europe, including Belgium, report cohort fertility levels of close to two children per woman; whereas Central European countries, such as Germany, have levels of around 1.6 children. In seeking to explain these differences, some scholars have stressed the role of the social policy context, while others have pointed to variation in fertility‐related social norms. But because these influences are interdependent, it is difficult to isolate their effects on fertility trends. This study attempts to disentangle these two factors by drawing on a quasi‐natural experiment. After World War I Germany was compelled to cede the Eupen–Malmedy territory to Belgium. The population of this region has retained its German linguistic identity, but has been subject to Belgian social policies. We examine whether the fertility trends in this German‐speaking region of Belgium follow the Belgian or the German pattern. Our findings indicate that they generally resemble the Belgian pattern. This suggests that institutional factors are important for understanding the current fertility differences in Western Europe.     

Thailand’s urban population reconsidered

In lieu of any official definition of “urban population” in Thailand, researchers and policy makers have generally used a simple urban-rural dichotomy, relying upon the administratively designated municipal areas as urban and the remainder of the kingdom as rural. For administrative purposes, however, a more refined set of residence categories is available: the “urban” segment is subdivided into three categories of municipal areas; within the “rural” group, units of population concentration classified as sanitary districts are distinguished from the remainder of the rural population. Data from a 1970 census sample tape have been used to analyze a number of socioeconomic characteristics, as well as migration and fertility, for each of these five residence categories separately in an attempt to determine if the formerly used rural-urban dichotomy is valid. For each of the characteristics and for migration and fertility, a clear urban-rural continuum emerges, with the sanitary districts generally resembling the smaller urban places more than they do the rural areas under which they are usually subsumed. The evaluation thus suggests the importance to research and policy either of using an urban-rural continuum or of grouping sanitary districts with municipal areas when a dichotomy must be used. Doing so should facilitate evaluation of the interrelations between urbanization and demographic and development factors.     

我国特大城市人口调控政策的量化研究——以北京市为例

国内关于特大城市人口调控政策的研究已有多年,但是这方面的政策量化分析还比较缺乏。以北京市为例,通过构建特大城市人口调控概念框架和指标体系,并收集和筛选北京市20世纪80年代中期以来涉及人口调控的相关政策文件,综合采用文献统计法和文本分析法,对北京市人口调控政策的总强度及演变规律、政策手段和措施的转变及特征等进行了量化分析。研究发现,北京市人口调控政策强度总体上呈现上升趋势,并且表现为明显的五阶段特征;人口调控政策发布的主体层次多元化且层级有所下移,基层调控的力度明显增大;人口调控政策手段已经基本摆脱依靠直接的行政管控措施为主,进入以间接手段为主、多手段并存的新阶段;人口调控措施从过去“以证控人”为主转变成“以业控人”为主,并表现为多措并举的新调控模式。最后,针对上述研究发现,得到一系列的政策启示并提出了相关的政策建议。     

First Politics,Then Culture: Accounting for Ethnic Differences in Demographic Behavior in Kenya

Ethnic differences in demographic behavior tend to be disguised behind analytically opaque labels like “district” or “region,” or else subjected to simplistic cultural explanations. Drawing on new political economy, sociological theory and the political science literature on sub‐Saharan Africa, this article proposes an alternative explanatory model and tests it empirically with reference to Kenya. Access to political power and, through power, access to a state's resources—including resources devoted to clinics, schools, labor opportunities, and other determinants of demographic behavior—are advanced as the key factors underlying ethnic differences. District‐level estimates of “political capital” are introduced and merged with two waves of Demographic and Health Survey data. The effects on models of contraceptive use are explored. Results confirm that measures of political capital explain residual ethnic differences in use, providing strong support for a political approach to the analysis of demographic behavior.     

Divergent Paths of Immigration Politics in the United States and Australia

The United States and Australia converged by the mid‐1980s on receptive and expan sive immigration policies reflecting “client” politics. Australia has since pursued a more restrictive and selective course while the United States has resisted pressures toward such a stance. The authors account for these differences by assessing the theoretical perspectives of interests, rights, and states. Conflicts among groups with direct interests in policy outcomes are the principal source of immigration politics, but a comparison of the roles of rights and state institutions helps explain peculiarities of the two cases. The distinctive Australian policy trajectory is shaped by greater volatility of public opinion about immigration and multiculturalism, and by political institutions that are more responsive to popular sentiment.     

Alvin Hansen on Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth

The driving forces of economic growth, according to the mainstream of classical economic thinking, are threefold: technological innovations, the opening up of new territories and discovery of new resources, and increase in population. In interaction, in an entrepreneurial market economy, these forces generate growth not only in the aggregate but also per capita. Evidence of their power was seen in the long stretch of rising living standards in the West over the nineteenth century, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle. However, the economic experience of the interwar years, and in particular the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggested that the forces were largely spent and hence that future economic prospects were gravely imperiled. The Keynesian revolution in economics was a response to the evident malfunctioning of the capitalist economic system, although the policy recipes it offered (for increasing demand and investment to levels capable of generating an equilibrium consistent with full employment of productive resources, especially labor) by no means commanded unanimity. The most prominent American contributor to and spokesman for the new line of economic analysis—often called “the American Keynes”—was Alvin H. Hansen (1887–1975), who took up his professorship of political economy at Harvard in 1937, just after the appearance of Keynes's General Theory. In that post, which he held until his retirement in 1956, he was one of the most influential economists of the era as a theorist, policy adviser, and teacher. Hansen interpreted the economic problems of the 1930s not just as the manifestation of a particularly sharp cyclical downturn, but as evidence of secular stagnation caused by the closing of the economic frontier, sluggishness in technological innovation, and, not least, “a drastic decline in population growth.” This “stagnation thesis” is most succinctly set out in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Detroit, 28 December 1938, under the title Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth. The address is re‐produced below from the March 1939 issue of the American Economic Review. (The opening paragraphs of the address, and two paragraphs, immediately preceding the closing paragraph, in which Hansen discusses changes in US national income in the 1930s, have been omitted.) Hansen's analysis of the effects of declining population growth in many ways echoes the thesis set out by Keynes in his seminal Galton Lecture delivered to the Eugenics Society in 1937 (reprinted in the Archives section of PDR 4, no. 3): a demographic slowdown decreases opportunities for profitable investments and increases levels of attempted saving, hence pushes the economy toward a low‐growth equilibrium at which resources are underutilized and unemployment is high. Hansen puts special emphasis on demographically induced shifts in the composition of output. He suggests that, beyond its direct positive effect on investment and output, population growth also has an indirect enhancing effect on these factors by facilitating technological progress–contrary to the “older Malthusian view.” In his policy proposals Hansen was more interventionist than Keynes, advocating a more intrusive government role in the economy as a possible means of escaping the vicious cycle of low demand and high unemployment. As to government action to reverse demographic trends seen as deleterious, neither Keynes nor Hansen argued for policies to increase fertility, presumably because they saw them as both inappropriate and, in comparison to remedial economic policy measures, inefficient or unfeasible. The demands of the war economy in the years following Hansen's address took care of the employment problem, and the immediate postwar decades brought the stimuli of pent‐up consumer demand, an outpouring of technological innovations, a reopening of the economic frontier produced by a more liberal trade regime, and, also, an acceleration of population growth. The result was rapid overall economic growth and increasing levels of per capita income. Keynesian demand management played some role in this economic success story: by the end of the 1960s even US President Richard Nixon pronounced himself a Keynesian. But it offered no remedy for the stagflation that eventually followed. The growth‐promoting recipes favored in the last decades of the century (especially in the most successful developing economies) were anything but Keynesian: limited government, fiscal restraint, and globalization. Yet recent and anticipated demographic trends, especially in Europe—notably fertility decline and population aging—make Hansen, once again, interesting reading. Commitments of the modern welfare state for health care, retirement pensions, and job security command wide approval, but they have boosted governments' weight in the economy and made labor markets inflexible, unemployment high, and retirement early—developments that may increasingly impose a brake on economic growth and on improvements of living standards. Reform measures to ease these burdens are, in principle, straightforward, but their immediate social costs are heavy and their rewards are delayed, hence resistance to reform is strong and growing. This is likely to stimulate the search for alternative policies that offer politically more palatable tradeoffs—some of which may turn out to have an unmistakably Hansenian flavor. As to future population trends, Hansen, despite his reference to a “drastic decline in population growth” based on a comparison of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Western demographic change, envisaged a convergence to a stationary population or a tendency toward very slow decrease. Yet some economies are already locked into a demographic pattern that augurs sharper declines and more rapid population aging, enhancing the relevance of the issues posed by Hansen. In Germany, for example, in the absence of immigration, the population between ages 20 and 40 will decline from 21.6 million in 2005 to 16.3 million in 2025—a drop of 23 percent. Over the same time period, the population aged 60 and older will grow from 20.5 million to 25.8 million—an increase of 26 percent. Serious efforts to slow population decline and retard population aging by stimulating fertility would of course add another major burden to government budgets.     

The Internetization of International Migration

The Internet has revolutionized our economies, societies, and everyday lives. Many social phenomena are no longer the same as they were in the pre‐Internet era: they have been “Internetized.” We define the Internetization of international migration, and we investigate it by exploring the links between the Internet and migration outcomes all along the migration path, from migration intentions to actual migration. Our analyses leverage a number of sources, both at the micro‐ and the macro‐level, including the Gallup World Poll, the Arab Barometer, data from the International Telecommunication Union, the Italian population register, and unique register data from a migrant reception center in Southern Italy. We also distinguish between economic migrants—those who leave their country of origin with the aim of seeking better economic opportunities elsewhere—and political migrants—those who are forced to leave their countries of origin for political or conflict‐related reasons. Our findings point to a consistently positive relationship between the diffusion of the Internet, migration intentions, and migration behaviors, supporting the idea that the Internet is not necessarily a driving force of migration per se, but rather an enabling “supportive agent.” These associations are particularly relevant for economic migrants, at least for migration intentions. Further analyses underscore the importance of the Internet in providing a key informational channel which helps to define clearer migration trajectories.     

Life Conditions and Opportunities of Young Adults: Evidence from Italy in European Comparative Perspective

This paper originates from the current political debate on the vulnerability and lack of opportunities of the young people in Italy that may stand in the way of enjoying a “good quality of life”. In particular, we refer to three basic life outcomes, namely “having enough money”, “enjoying an adequate life standard” and “enjoying good health” that summarize the aspirations of many young people. The paper is intended not only to stress the particular features for the Italian case but also to present a comparative analysis across the European Countries. Moreover, the discussion on the above issues is referred to the group of individuals between 26 and 40 years-old since this group includes different generations of young people facing different opportunities to achieve independent adult life in the presence of a wide range of educational, employment, housing or social-welfare policies that might support or hinder the autonomisation process. In detail, we use a life-course causal model in order to study how, for every individual, the current outcomes may be even strongly related to past outcomes and we highlight that the understanding of the causes of “succeeding in life” in a comparative perspective across Europe can be an useful tool for Italian policy makers in order to pursue the goal of planning a future for Italian younger generations.