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Migration, both within and beyond borders, has become an increasingly prominent theme in domestic and international debates, and is the topic of the 2009 Human Development Report.
HUMAN MOBILITY AND DEVELOPMENT
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2009
The report investigates migration in the context of demographic changes and trends in both growth and inequality. It also presents more detailed and nuanced individual, family and village experiences, and explores less visible movements typically pursued by disadvantaged groups such as short term and seasonal migration.
There is a range of evidence about the positive impacts of migration on human development, through such avenues as increased household incomes and improved access to education and health services. There is further evidence that migration can empower traditionally disadvantaged groups, in particular women. At the same time, risks to human development are also present where migration is a reaction to threats and denial of choice, and where regular opportunities for movement are constrained. Read more...
Related Publications
The Causes and Effects of International Labor Mobility: Evidence from OECD Countries 1980-2005. Francesc Ortega and Giovanni Peri. This paper contains three important contributions to the literature on international migrations. First, it compiles a new dataset on migration flows and stocks and on immigration laws for 14 OECD destination countries and 74 sending countries for each year over the period 1980-2005. Second, it extends the empirical model of migration choice across multiple destinations, by Grogger and Hanson (2008), by allowing for unobserved individual heterogeneity between migrants and non-migrants. The model to derive a pseudo-gravity empirical specification of the economic and legal determinants of international migration is used. Estimates show that bilateral migration flows are increasing in the income per capita gap between origin and destination. Also, the paper evidences that bilateral flows decrease significantly when the destination countries adopt stricter immigration laws. Third, the impact of immigration flows on employment, investment and productivity is estimated in the receiving OECD countries using as instruments the ”push” factors only in the gravity equation. We find that immigration increases employment one for one, implying no crowding-out of natives. In addition, investment responds rapidly and vigorously, and total factor productivity is not affected. These results imply that immigration increases the total GDP of the receiving country in the short-run one-for-one, without affecting average wages or labor productivity. We also find that the effects of immigration are less beneficial when the receiving economy is in bad economic times.
The Governance of Migration Policy. In this paper, Gordon H. Hanson examines high-income country motives for restricting immigration. Abundant evidence suggests that allowing labor to move from low-income to high-income countries would yield substantial gains in global income. Yet, most high-income countries impose strict limits on labor inflows and set their admission policies unilaterally. Read more...
Migration, Poverty Reduction Strategies and Human Development. Richard Black and Jon Sward. This paper focuses on the specific question of how Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) address migration and its potential to enhance human development at the national level. Based on a review of PRSPs completed since 1999, it argues that migration often remains poorly recognised or analysed in poorer countries in terms of its impacts on poverty reduction, whilst attitudes towards migration in these countries are often highly negative and/or based on limited evidence, especially in relation to internal migration. Analysis of how both internal and international migration are treated in PRSPs is also placed in the context of a broader understanding of the purpose of, and constraints faced by the PRS process. Read more...