Internal geographical mobility and health: evidence from ITA.LI (Italian Lives), the Italian longitudinal study [Mobilità geografica interna e condizioni di salute in una prospettiva di corso di vita Uno studio longitudinale sui dati ITA.LI (Italian Lives)]

This research aims to investigate the role of geographical mobility (understood as moving between three macro areas of the Italian territory - North, Centre, South and Islands) in health inequalities. In this article, it is hypothesized that individuals who migrated from the South of Italy to the North improved their living conditions and that these advantages positively affected their health. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that internal migrants suffer a penalty linked to their origin, which does not allow them to reach the levels of health of individuals originating from the North. The analysis is based on data from the first retrospective wave of the ITA.LI (Italian Lives) longitudinal study, conducted in 2019/2020 on all individuals aged 16 or over from a sample of approximately 5,000 Italian families. The health indicators used for the purposes of the analysis are the self-assessed health and risk factors such as the body mass index and the practice of physical activity. Sequence analysis was implemented to represent the internal migration paths and identify groups of individuals with similar geographical mobility patterns. Five clusters of internal migration were defined. The analyses illustrate that individuals who moved from the southern regions to the North show better health outcomes than those who have never moved from the South and that people who have moved to the North have slightly worse health outcomes than those who have always lived in the northern regions.