Abstract
Data on stocks and flows of international migration are necessary to understand migrant patterns and trends and to monitor and evaluate migration-relevant international development agendas. Many countries do not publish data on bilateral migration flows. At least six methods have been proposed recently to estimate bilateral migration flows between all origin-destination country pairs based on migrant stock data published by the World Bank and United Nations. We apply each of these methods to the latest available stock data to provide six estimates of five-year bilateral migration flows between 1990 and 2015. To assess the resulting estimates, we correlate estimates of six migration measures from each method with equivalent reported data where possible. Such systematic efforts at validation have largely been neglected thus far. We show that the correlation between the reported data and the estimates varies widely among different migration measures, over space, and over time. We find that the two methods using a closed demographic accounting approach perform consistently better than the four other estimation approaches.
Highlights
Background & SummaryInternational migration is becoming an ever more important component of population growth[1], a driver for socio-economic change[2,3] and a topic for policy debate[4] in many countries
To supply migration flow estimates based on the most recent migrant stock data and systematic comparisons of different methods, in this paper we apply multiple methods for estimating migration flows from stocks to produce estimates of the bilateral international migration flows between all pairs of 200 countries for five five-year periods from mid-year (July 1) 1990 to mid-year (June 30) 2015, using the most recent set of bilateral migration stocks published by the United Nations
We propose a set of validation exercises based on a number of commonly used migration measures and reported migration flow data
Summary
International migration is becoming an ever more important component of population growth[1], a driver for socio-economic change[2,3] and a topic for policy debate[4] in many countries. The first set of methods uses the differences in successive bilateral stocks for a given pair of countries to estimate the corresponding migration flows in each direction. Www.nature.com/scientificdata the residuals in a global demographic account These so-called “demographic accounting” approaches estimate migration flows to match increases or decreases in the reported bilateral stocks of migrants, and births and deaths during the period. To supply migration flow estimates based on the most recent migrant stock data and systematic comparisons of different methods, in this paper we apply multiple methods for estimating migration flows from stocks to produce estimates of the bilateral international migration flows between all pairs of 200 countries for five five-year periods from mid-year (July 1) 1990 to mid-year (June 30) 2015, using the most recent set of bilateral migration stocks published by the United Nations. The following sections outline the estimates of bilateral international migration between all pairs of 200 countries for five-year periods during 1990–2015 based on six estimation methods
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