Abstract
This paper explores the relationships between international human migration and merchandise trade using a complex-network approach. We firstly compare the topological structure of worldwide networks of human migration and bilateral trade over the period 1960–2000. Next, we ask whether pairs of countries that are more central in the migration network trade more. We show that: (i) the networks of international migration and trade are strongly correlated, and such correlation can be mostly explained by country economic/demographic size and geographical distance; (ii) centrality in the international-migration network boosts bilateral trade; (iii) intensive forms of country centrality are more trade enhancing than their extensive counterparts. Our findings suggest that bilateral trade between any two countries is not only affected by the presence of migrants from either countries, but also by their relative embeddedness in the complex web of corridors making up the network of international human migration.
Highlights
Cross-border human migration and international trade account for a large part of yearly mobility of people and goods across our planet, and their importance has been relentlessly growing during the last waves of globalization [1]
We show that: (i) the networks of international migration and trade are strongly correlated, and such correlation can be mostly explained by country economic/demographic size and geographical distance; (ii) centrality in the international-migration network boosts bilateral trade; (iii) intensive forms of country centrality are more trade enhancing than their extensive counterparts
This paper has explored the relationships between international migration and trade using a complex-network approach
Summary
Cross-border human migration and international trade account for a large part of yearly mobility of people and goods across our planet, and their importance has been relentlessly growing during the last waves of globalization [1]. Over the period 1960–2010, for example, the share of total world exports over real-domestic product (GDP) has increased by 172%, whereas human migration, in terms of number of world immigrants, more than doubled, with an estimated migrant population of more than 200 million in 2010. Despite in the last decades governments have kept reducing barriers to trade without proportionally lowering those to immigration, the share of world migrants to population has increased by almost 20%. The extraordinary growth in cross-country human migration and trade did not occur only intensively, and extensively. (Intensive growth refers to increasing migration stocks over a fixed set of migration corridors, whereas extensive growth concerns the creation of new migration corridors). Over the period 1960–2000, the number of newly-created export channels between world countries exhibited a threefold increase. Simple back-of-the-envelope calculations on World Development Indicators (WDI) data [2], show that the number of new emigration corridors almost doubled
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