The challenge of permeable borders: estimating cross-border employment between Italy and Switzerland

A specific type of labour mobility concerns ‘cross-border workers’ or ‘cross-border commuters’, who are citizens that reside in one country but work in another one, and for this purpose move across the border regularly. Even focusing on this specific aspect, the extent and evolution of the phenomenon are difficult to grasp, since harmonised and comparable data are not available at neither European nor national level. Among European countries, Italy is an important 'supplier' of cross-border labour, though according to a recent study (ISTAT 2014) its significance at national level remains very small relative to the total employed population (approximately 0.3 % or 90 000 in absolute terms). Furthermore, cross-border movements are highly localized on the territory, namely along the longest and traditionally most accessible land border in terms of infrastructures, that is the border between the Italian regions of Lombardy and Piedmont and Switzerland. In the last decade, the Territorial Office for Lombardy of the Italian National Institute of Statistics has been at the forefront of research to study this phenomenon.