Long-Term Trends in International Migration: Lessons from Macroeconomic Model

Frédéric Docquier

doi:10.18559/ebr.2018.1.1

Abstract

In this paper I develop a stylized model of the world economy and use it to explain the long-run trends in international migration. The model very well fits the trends of the last 40 years which are mainly governed by the evolution of population disparities between industrialized and developing countries. Then I provide migration projections for the 21st century and show that future migration is also governed by socio-demographic changes. I predict a robust increase in immigration pressures from sub-Saharan Africa and MENA countries to European countries.

Highlights

Between 1960 and 2010 the worldwide stock of international migrants increased from 92 to 211 million at the same pace as the world population
Technological variants drastically affect within-country income disparities, they have negligible effects on aggregate migration stocks. This is due to the fact that income disparities are mostly governed by between-country inequality and that the worldwide proportion of college graduates is so small that changes in their migration propensity have negligible aggregate effects
If the population of each country had been constant the stock of worldwide migrants in 1970 would have only been 2% smaller than the current stocks. This confirms that past changes in aggregate migrant stocks were predominantly governed by demographic imbalances: in particular the ratio of native population between developing and high-income countries increased from 3.5 in 1970 to 5.5 in 2010

Summary

Introduction

Between 1960 and 2010 the worldwide stock of international migrants increased from 92 to 211 million at the same pace as the world population. A remarkable fact is that this change is totally explained by the inflow of immigrants from developing countries, whose share in the total population increased from 1.5 to 8.0% (once again, +6.5 percentage points). In less developed countries (LDC), the total stock of emigrants increased at the same pace as the total population leading to small fluctuations of the emigration rate between 2.6 and 3.0%. As part of this emigration process the share of emigrants to HIC in the population increased from 0.5 to 1.4%. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 1 deals with the problem of predictive power of macroeconomic models.

Predictive power of macroeconomic models

Root drivers of past migration

Forecasts for the 21st century

Conclusion