Occupational change and geographical inequality: A comparison between Central and Marginal areas in Italy

Integrating the scientific debate on the transformation of occupational structure in the contemporary labour markets with that on the geographical dimension of inequality, this article aims to shed light on the trajectories of occupational change at sub-national level in Italy. Firstly, exploiting the SNAI classification of Italian municipalities in terms of spatial peripherality, we distinguish the Italian provinces (level NUTS 3) in three degrees of marginality. Then, we realize our analysis of the occupational change from 2011 to 2020 applying a multi-indicators approach, by making use of two different indicators of job quality (ISEI and SIOPS), Lastly, considering the specificities of the Italian case, we integrate the analysis on the Italian provinces by degree of marginality accounting also for the traditional North/South dualism. Our findings clearly show that, for each job quality indicator, the patterns of occupational change are always worse in the marginal provinces than in the central and semi-central ones. Moreover, the marginal provinces of the South appear the most problematic, suffering a sort of «double penalty», while the marginal provinces of the Centre-North show less dramatic outcomes compared not only with the marginal provinces of the South, but also with the other provinces of the Centre-North.