Abstract
Migration is one of the key aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To understand global migration patterns, develop scenarios, design effective policies, focus on the population’s needs, and identify how these needs change over time, we need accurate, reliable and timely data. The gaps in international migration data have persisted since international organizations collect data. To improve the data gaps, there is a need to conceptualize the types of gaps and pinpoint the gaps within the international data systems. To that end, the ultimate objective of this paper is twofold, (i) to review and categorize the gaps in the literature and (ii) assess the statistical data sources, i.e., United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs (UN DESA), Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Organization for Migration (IOM), Eurostat, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Our results demonstrate that the gaps could be categorized under (1) definitions and measures, (2) drivers or reasons behind migration, (3) geographic coverage, (4) gaps in demographic characteristics and (5) the time lag in the availability of data. The reviewed sources suffer from the gaps, which are not mutually exclusive (they are interlinked): the quality and availability of both migration flows and stocks data vary across regions and countries, and migration statistics highly rely on immigrants’ arrival.
Highlights
We reviewed the selected studies to investigate what the scholars and practitioners sources, followed the guidelines on a systematic review of statistical data sources develdescribe as gaps, where the data are short and what types of data are needed for future oped in the previous section
This means that identified, and five, namely the United Nations (UN) DESA, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), International Organization for Migration (IOM), OECD and Eurostat, were sethe gaps in data are discussed in a scattered fashion across the literature from various lected for the review
Our results demonstrate that significant gaps could be categorized under (1) definitions and measures, (2) drivers or reasons behind migration, (3)
Summary
Academic Editors: Anna Visvizi andWadim StrielkowskiReceived: 1 March 2021Accepted: 1 April 2021Published: 5 April 2021Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).Migration deserves its place at the top of the scientific and socio-political agendas due to being a consistent feature of every era. Not surprisingly, migration is considered as one of the key aspects for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1]. The
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