Ethnic segregation in a metropolitan area of Italy: the case of Palermo

Ethnic residential segregation in Italy is an emerging key question, which will be crucial in the definition and implementation of both urbanistic and social policies. This paper focuses on this phenomenon in the Italian metropolitan area of Palermo. We use individual data for all the population residing in the city at 31 December 2011, organised by ethnicity and neighbourhood ("quartiere"). Firstly, we describe the residential segregation of foreigners and, among other measures, we apply the Duncan and Duncan dissimilarity index. Then, we apply a recent methodological approach, which allows reducing the bias of the Duncan’s index and performs better than previous bias reduction techniques, in terms of both mean bias and MSE