The paths of many migrants include multiple destinations and transit routes, yet this pattern is almost never reflected in empirical analyses. For example, 9 percent of recent immigrants to the United States arrived from a transit country as opposed to the country where they were born.
... See More + Among those arriving from many high-income countries, the transit migration ratio exceeds 30 percent. To explain these patterns, this paper constructs a dynamic model of global migration that allows transit migration opportunities to impact the attractiveness of locations. After estimating the structural parameters of the model, the paper simulates various counterfactual scenarios to highlight the spillovers of transit migration paths.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7880 NOV 07, 2016
Household expenditures for children-related goods may change when one of the parent migrates and do so differently depending on whether it is the mother or the father that leaves.
... See More + A sequential model that explains migration and budget allocation choices is proposed and its predictions are tested on data from Indonesia. Selection of households into female migration is accounted for using a set of instrumental variables derived from the model. Results show that when children are left with fathers, the household budget is significantly diverted toward the purchase of adult private goods, but the share of budget devoted to children remains unaffected because mothers compensate by giving up their own private consumption and sending home more remittances.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7838 SEP 27, 2016
Project greenback 2.0, remittances champion cities consists in identifying cities where a series of measures are implemented to foster the development of a sound remittance market.
... See More + The objective of the project is the promotion of transparency and competition in the market for remittances and, ultimately, the reduction of prices for remittance services. Montreuil, France is the second Remittances Champion City after Turin, Italy. This report presents the main results of the survey. It starts with an overview of migration from and remittances to the selected countries. It then presents the research objectives and describes both the survey design and sampling methodology as well as the challenges posed by the field work. It is followed by a presentation of the main findings of the survey, based on a total sample of 428 migrants. After a brief description of the socio-demographic characteristics of the surveyed migrants, the discussion focuses on their financial inclusion and their remittance behavior. The last part of the report provides concluding remarks on the policy options for private and public actions to promote the objectives of greenback 2.0.
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Discussions of high-skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries, which ignore movements to and between developing countries.
... See More + This paper presents, for the first time, a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by gender and education in 1990 and 2000, and calculation of nuanced brain drain indicators. Building on newly collated data, the paper uses a novel estimation procedure based on a pseudo-gravity model, then identifies key determinants of international migration, and subsequently uses estimated parameters to impute missing data. Non-OECD destinations account for one-third of skilled-migration, while OECD destinations are declining in relative importance.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6863 MAY 01, 2014
The Employing Skilled Expatriates indicators analyze the skilled immigration regime relevant for foreign direct investment across 93 economies to provide comparable information about this regulatory space.
... See More + The indicators focus on restrictions that control the inflow of skilled immigrants (quotas); the ease of hiring skilled expatriates (time and procedural steps to obtain a temporary work permit, existence of online application systems, availability of a one-stop shop and fast-tracking option); and the existence of a path to permanent residency and citizenship as well as the existence of spousal work permits. As governments increasingly seek to attract foreign direct investment as a driver of long-term development, reforming the investment climate -- including the skilled immigration regime -- is one policy option to consider. This analysis shows a positive correlation between the Employing Skilled Expatriates index and foreign direct investment inflows. As measured by the Employing Skilled Expatriates index, there is room for economies with a need for skilled workers to improve their immigration regimes as one means of attracting more foreign direct investment. In Singapore and the Republic of Korea, it only takes ten days on average to obtain a temporary work permit. In Honduras, the same process can take up to 22 weeks. The global average to obtain a temporary work permit is eight weeks. The process is the fastest in the East Asia and the Pacific region where it takes five weeks. With 11 weeks, the processing time in the Middle East and North Africa region is the slowest.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6708 NOV 01, 2013
Most migration surveys do not ask about the legal status of migrants due to concerns about the sensitivity of this question. List randomization is a technique that has been used in a number of other social science applications to elicit sensitive information.
... See More + This paper trials this technique by adding it to surveys conducted in Ethiopia, Mexico, Morocco, and the Philippines. It shows how, in principal, this can be used both to give an estimate of the overall rate of illegal migration in the population being surveyed, as well as to determine illegal migration rates for subgroups such as more or less educated households. The results suggest that there is some useful information in this method: higher rates of illegal migration in countries where illegal migration is thought to be more prevalent and households who say they have a migrant are more likely to report having an illegal migrant. Nevertheless, some of the other findings also suggest some possible inconsistencies or noise in the conclusions obtained using this method. The authors suggest directions for future attempts to implement this approach in migration surveys.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6426 APR 01, 2013
Policy makers apply skilled labor gap projections to their immigration policies in a number of ways including: differentiating immigration policies by region, based on skills supply and demand mismatches; introducing more flexibility in admissions policies to acquire specific skills; and designing programs to actively attract immigrants with specific needed skills to specific occupations.
... See More + Challenges in projecting an economy's demand for skilled foreign labor may include bias and gaps in available data sources, as well as difficulty determining the most appropriate methodology and impediments posed by imperfect methodological assumptions. A difficult economic context may provide further challenges to projecting and filling foreign labor needs.
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Policy makers apply skilled labor gap projections to their immigration policies in a number of ways including: differentiating immigration policies by region, based on skills supply and demand mismatches; introducing more flexibility in admissions policies to acquire specific skills; and designing programs to actively attract immigrants with specific needed skills to specific occupations.
... See More + Challenges in projecting an economy's demand for skilled foreign labor may include bias and gaps in available data sources, as well as difficulty determining the most appropriate methodology and impediments posed by imperfect methodological assumptions. A difficult economic context may provide further challenges to projecting and filling foreign labor needs.
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The international migration of high-skilled workers may trigger productivity effects at the macro level such that the wage rate of skilled workers increases in host countries and decrease in source countries.
... See More + The authors exploit data on international bilateral migration flows and provide evidence consistent with this theoretical hypothesis. They propose various instrumentation strategies to identify the causal effect of skilled migration on log differences of GDP per capita, total factor productivity, and the wages of skilled workers between pairs of source and destination countries. These strategies aim to address the endogeneity problem that arises when international wage differences affect migration decisions.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6317 JAN 01, 2013
The initial occupational placements of male immigrants in the United States labor market vary significantly by country of origin even when education and other individual factors are taken into account.
... See More + Does the heterogeneity persist over time? Using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses, this paper finds that the performance of migrants from countries with lower initial occupational placement levels improves at a higher rate compared with that of migrants originating from countries with higher initial performance levels. Nevertheless, the magnitude of convergence suggests that full catch-up is unlikely. The impact of country specific attributes on the immigrants' occupational placement occurs mainly through their effect on initial performance and they lose significance when initial occupational levels are controlled for in the estimation.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6140 JUL 01, 2012
The authors use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to gross domestic product shocks in destination countries.
... See More + They find a large significant elasticity of migrant numbers to gross domestic product shocks at destination, but no significant wage response. This is consistent with binding minimum wages for migrant labor. This result implies that labor market imperfections that make international migration attractive also make migrant flows more sensitive to global business cycles. Difference-in-differences analysis of a minimum wage change for maids confirms that minimum wages bind and demand is price sensitive without these distortions.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6041 APR 01, 2012
Immigrants tend to be more negatively affected by economic crisis than natives, particularly when governments apply strict immigration controls.
... See More + With the onset of the financial crisis in the latter half of 2008, there were widespread concerns: would migrants return to sending countries and communities in large numbers, adding further economic woes to countries already facing difficulties? Would remittance flows slow and potentially cease? The literature offers little guidance on these questions. It is always a challenge to collect data, analyze, interpret, and make recommendations as the phenomenon under study is still unfolding to reveal new turns and twists. The most recent financial crisis and its repercussions are yet to be completed, and scholars have only begun processing the event. This volume is an effort to bring together in one place fresh thinking and evidence from around the world on the outcomes of mobility in the context of global financial crisis. This book is perhaps the first comprehensive study of remittances during the financial crisis and is a timely addition to the literature. It comes at a time when countries are grappling with the global financial crisis and it's after effects. The resilience of remittances is good news for developing countries, but leveraging remittances for socioeconomic development remains a key challenge. The studies in this book identify and discuss key patterns observed in remittance practices across the world and possibilities for the future.
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Global matrices of bilateral migrant stocks spanning 19602000 are presented, disaggregated by gender and based primarily on the foreign-born definition of migrants.
... See More + More than one thousand census and population register records are combined to construct decennial matrices corresponding to the five census rounds between 1960 and 2000. For the first time, a comprehensive picture of bilateral global migration over the second half of the 20th century emerges. The data reveal that the global migrant stock increased from 92 million in 1960 to 165 million in 2000. Quantitatively, migration between developing countries dominates, constituting half of all international migration in 2000. When the partition of India and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are accounted for, migration between developing countries is remarkably stable over the period. Migration from developing to developed countries is the fastest growing component of international migration in both absolute and relative terms. The United States has remained the most important migrant destination in the world, home to one fifth of the worlds migrants and the top destination for migrants from some 60 sending countries. Migration to Western Europe has come largely from elsewhere in Europe. The oil-rich Persian Gulf countries emerge as important destinations for migrants from the Middle East and North Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Finally, although the global migrant stock is predominantly male, the proportion of female migrants increased noticeably between 1960 and 2000. The number of women rose in every region except South Asia.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS5709 JUN 01, 2011
Ozden, Caglar; Parsons, Christopher R.; Schiff, Maurice; Walmsley, Terrie L.Disclosed
This paper reviews the existing literature on the impact of migrants networks on the patterns of international migration. It covers the theoretical channels at stake in the global effect of the networks.
... See More + It identifies the key issues, namely the impact on size, selection and concentration of the migration flows. The paper also reviews the empirical hurdles that the researchers face in assessing the importance of networks. The key issues concern the choice of micro vs a macro approach, the definition of a network, the access to suitable data and the adoption of econometric methods accounting for the main features of those data. Finally, the paper reports a set of estimation outcomes reflecting the main findings of the macro approach.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS5721 JUN 01, 2011
High-skilled emigration is an emotive issue that in popular discourse is often referred to as brain drain, conjuring images of extremely negative impacts on developing countries.
... See More + Recent discussions of brain gain, diaspora effects, and other advantages of migration have been used to argue against this, but much of the discussion has been absent of evidence. This paper builds upon a new wave of empirical research to answer eight key questions underlying much of the brain drain debate: 1) What is brain drain? 2) Why should economists care about it? 3) Is brain drain increasing? 4) Is there a positive relationship between skilled and unskilled migration? 5) What makes brain drain more likely? 6) Does brain gain exist? 7) Do high-skilled workers remit, invest, and share knowledge back home? and 8) What do we know about the fiscal and production externalities of brain drain?
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS5668 MAY 01, 2011
This Results Profile talks about supporting the migration reforms in Europe and Central Asia. The global economic crisis had a negative impact on migration and remittances in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region.
... See More + Migration and Remittance Peer-Assisted Learning Network (MIRPAL) was established by World Bank. It brought together migration experts and practitioners from sending and receiving countries to discuss analytical work, and lessons learned in addressing labor migration management policy by the countries of the CIS. Based on the dialogue, countries were able to raise the visibility of migration and start implementing national action plans.
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This Results Profile talks about supporting the migration reforms in Europe and Central Asia. The global economic crisis had a negative impact on migration and remittances in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region.
... See More + Migration and Remittance Peer-Assisted Learning Network (MIRPAL) was established by World Bank. It brought together migration experts and practitioners from sending and receiving countries to discuss analytical work, and lessons learned in addressing labor migration management policy by the countries of the CIS. Based on the dialogue, countries were able to raise the visibility of migration and start implementing national action plans.
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