Income differentials and global migration in the contemporary world-economy

Abstract

Shifting the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the world as a whole fundamentally changes our understanding of migration. Elsewhere, the authors have argued that ascriptive criteria centered on national identity and citizenship have long served as a fundamental basis of inequality in the world. Here, they develop a model that seeks to identify the main forces driving migration across the world-economy. They test this model by drawing on an original cross-national dataset on population flows. This allows them to more precisely identify country- and region-specific patterns of outgoing and incoming migration, and to assess the relative weight of specific variables (e.g., wage differentials between countries, the extent of income inequality and social mobility in sending and receiving countries, civil war, famine, geopolitical location, and migration policy regimes) in explaining these patterns. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of their findings for a more productive understanding of global social stratification and mobility in the contemporary world-economy.