Foreign-born internal migrants: Are they playing a different role than natives on income convergence in Spain?

The main purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether internal migration of foreign-born residents is behind the infant process of provincial income convergence that is taking place in Spain since 2001. In order to fulfil this goal, we propose a new approach within the Markov chain framework that enables us to explore the migration-convergence relationship. For the sake of comparison, this approach is applied to internal migration flows of both foreign-born and natives. The results obtained indicate that the increasingly larger share of foreign-born residents in internal migration is not the cause of the recent reactivation of the provincial convergence process. In addition, these results also reveal that differences between foreign-born and natives in the way they move within Spain do not have a significantly distinct effect on income convergence. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.