A spatially varying relationship between the proportion of foreign citizens and income at local authorities in Greece

The aim of this paper is to spatially examine the connection between the proportion of foreign citizens and household income at local authority level in Greece. Since the majority of foreign citizens in Greece are economic immigrants, it is interesting to understand if their presence at municipality level is associated with high household income or poverty. One could expect either a positive or a negative association for difference reasons. The traditional correlation coefficient suggests a positive and significant relationship. However, when this is examined locally, using a geographically weighted Pearson correlation coefficient, the relationship is spatially nonstationary. There are touristic areas where the relationship is much stronger. The latter nonstationarity is sensitive to the size of the spatial kernel; the smaller the kernel size is, the wider the range of the local coefficients is.