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The Equal Pay Act in the UK has had a limited effect on earnings, but the gap nonetheless is still substantial; in the distributive trades, no women gets on average more than two‐thirds of men's earnings, and among non‐manual workers, women get on average only half. Yet in other EEC countries, minimum earnings are the same for men and women. Enzo Pontarollo, contributing the second half of his major feature on hours, wages and earnings in EEC countries, suggests that this international comparison reinforces the proposition that distribution in Britain is a low‐pay sector (whatever definition of low pay is taken), and that this is true not only in relation to earnings in Britain, but also in relation to distributive workers in other EEC countries. The writer has spent a period of nine months or so discussing working conditions in large‐scale retailing with retail managements and trade unions in EEC countries. The project has been funded by the Italian retail group, La Rinascente.

The pattern of flexible trading hours, with one or two late‐night openings, is now generally accepted in the UK, as it has been in most EEC countries. But now there is clear evidence from most of these countries of a growing separation between working and trading hours — trading hours are increasing but working hours are diminishing. We also need to look more closely at the effect of extended trading hours; evidence is emerging that Saturday afternoon is losing ground as a crucial sales period, and is being replaced by late‐nights. This article examines the trends in working and trading hours in EEC countries, and the effect on turnover. It has been written by an Italian research worker currently based in Oxford, who has spent the last nine months talking to retail managements and to trade unions on working conditions in large‐scale retailing in EEC countries. He has visited several countries in the course of his research and the project has been funded by the Italian retail group, La Rinascente. A future article will deal with bargaining structures, and wages and earnings.

This paper empirically explores the spatial distribution of the four major South Asian communities in Italian municipalities between 2004 and 2014 and identifies the key determinants of these patterns.

SAP’s (South Asian People) location patterns are investigated through a large and varied set of explanatory variables. Employing a settlement model and the inflow approach, we disentangle the impact of conventional pull factors and the network effect.

We observe how SAP in Italy are concentrated in some specific locations, away from the natives. This decentralised clustered distribution results from a mix of contextual pull factors and ethnic networks with a strong local character. However, national communities exhibit striking differences in location patterns, determined by different pull factors. We found evidence of the overall persistence of drivers over time, which generated substantial inertia in the settlement patterns of SAP national groups over the 2008 crisis.

We stressed how SAP have different settlement patterns and drivers, so they cannot be treated as a unicum. They call for place-based policies tailored to the specific needs of individual communities.

We examine the relevant but under-researched SAP diaspora in Italy by comparing the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan location models across all the Italian municipalities and checking if and how their spatial distribution changed over the 2008 crisis.