Christopher Robert Parsons

Quantifying International Migration: A Database of Bilateral Migrant Stocks

This paper introduces four versions of an international bilateral migration stock database for 226 by 226 countries and territories. The first three versions each consist of two matrices, the first containing migrants defined by country of birth, that is, the foreign-born population; the second, by nationality, that is, the foreign population. Wherever possible, the information is collected from the 2000 round of censuses, though older data are included where this information was unavailable. The first version of the matrices contains as much data as could be collated at the time of writing but also contains gaps. The later versions progressively use a variety of techniques to estimate the missing data. The final matrix, comprising only the foreign-born, attempts to reconcile all of the available information to provide the researcher with a single and complete matrix of international bilateral migrant stocks. The final section of the paper describes some of the patterns evident in the database. For example, immigration to the United States is dominated by Latin America, whereas Western European immigration draws heavily on Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean region. Over one-third of world migration is from developing to industrial countries and about a quarter between developing countries. Intra-developed country and intra-FSU (former Soviet Union) flows each account for about 15 percent of the total. Over half of migration is between countries with linguistic ties. Africa accounts for 8 percent of Western Europes immigration and much less of that to other rich regions.

Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration

We examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration. We distinguish between unexpected short-run factors, captured by natural disasters, as well as long-run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long-run averages. Starting from a simple neo-classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960-2000 that allows us to control for numerous time-varying and time invariant factors. We find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample. These results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable. In contrast, there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages. We further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs.

Do Migrants Really Foster Trade? The Trade-Migration Nexus, a Panel Approach 1960-2000

Despite the burgeoning empirical literature providing evidence of a strong and robust positive correlation between trade and migration, doubts persist as to unobserved factors which may be driving this relationship. This paper re-examines the trade-migration nexus using a panel spanning several decades, which comprises the majority of world trade and migration in every decade. First the findings common to the literature are reproduced. Country-pair fixed effects are then used to account for unobserved bilateral factors, the implementation of which removes all of the positive impact of migration on trade. In other words the unobserved factors, a leading candidate for which it is argued is international bilateral ties, are on average strongly and positively correlated with migrant networks. Dividing the world into the relatively affluent North and poorer South, the results show that migrants from either region only affect Northern exports to the South. This is intuitive since in general countries of the North export more differentiated products and information barriers between these regions are greatest. A country-level analysis further shows that migrants may both create and divert trade. Taken as a whole, the results demonstrate the large biases inherent in cross-sectional studies investigating the trade-migration nexus and highlight the extent to which previous results have been overstated.

The Gravity of High-Skilled Migration Policies

Combining unique, annual, bilateral data on labor flows of highly skilled immigrants for 10 OECD destinations between 2000 and 2012, with new databases comprising both unilateral and bilateral policy instruments, we present the first judicious cross-country assessment of policies aimed to attract and select high-skilled workers. Points-based systems are much more effective in attracting and selecting high-skilled migrants than requiring a job offer, labor market tests, and shortage lists. Offers of permanent residency, while attracting the highly skilled, overall reduce the human capital content of labor flows because they prove more attractive to non-high-skilled workers. Bilateral recognition of diploma and social security agreements foster greater flows of high-skilled workers and improve the skill selectivity of immigrant flows. Conversely, double taxation agreements deter high-skilled migrants, although they do not alter overall skill selectivity. Our results are robust to a variety of empirical specifications that account for destination-specific amenities, multilateral resistance to migration, and the endogeneity of immigration policies.

Migrant Networks and Trade: The Vietnamese Boat People as a Natural Experiment

We provide cogent evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants and in doing so establish an important link between migrant networks and long-run economic development. To this end, we exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US. This episode represents an ideal natural experiment as the large immigration shock, the first wave of which comprised refugees exogenously allocated across the US, occurred over a twenty-year period during which time the US imposed a complete trade embargo on Vietnam. Following the lifting of trade restrictions in 1994, the share of US exports going to Vietnam was higher and more diversified in those US States with larger Vietnamese populations, themselves the result of larger refugee inflows 20 years earlier.

International migration, trade and aid: a survey

In this chapter we survey the voluminous literature on migration affecting trade and the somewhat less developed literature linking aid flows to migration. We aim to guide the reader through the two literatures, highlighting key contributions and identifying important lines of enquiry. Simmering below the surface of both literatures is the issue of causation. Given the macroeconomic nature of the global flows under examination and the numerous direct and indirect links that potentially exist between them, establishing causality proves particularly problematic and is thus an issue that we pay close attention to throughout. The evidence from the trade and migration literature, in which causality has been more concretely established, suggests an almost ubiquitous positive effect of migration on trade, although exceptions exist; this suggests that richer data might be required to delve even deeper into the trade-migration nexus. While policymakers often wish that aid reduced migration, the literature suggests the opposite - namely that aid increases emigration. The mechanism has yet to be resolutely established in this literature, however, which suggests a need for future research.

On the Economic Geography of International Migration

We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Zipfs and Gibrats Laws in the context of aggregate and high-skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non-parametric analysis. The top tails of the distributions of aggregate and high-skilled immigrants and emigrants adhere to a Pareto distribution with an exponent of unity i.e. Zipfs Law holds. We find some evidence in favour of Gibrats Law holding for immigration stocks, i.e. that the growth in stocks is independent of their initial values and stronger evidence that immigration densities are diverging over time. Conversely, emigrant stocks are converging in the sense that countries with smaller emigrant stocks are growing faster than their larger sovereign counterparts. Lastly, high skilled immigration and emigration stocks expressed in levels or as densities all exhibit signs of convergence. We conclude by discussing some competing mechanisms that could be driving the observed patterns including: differing fertility rates, reductions in emigration restrictions, migrant sorting and selective immigration policies, immigrant networks and persisting wage differentials.

Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration: Redux

In this article, we revisit the issue of environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration, thereby providing an extension of our earlier paper. In contrast to Beine and Parsons (2015, The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 117, 723–767) and in light of recent empirical contributions, we adopt an alternative identification strategy in which we only include fixed effects together with our measures of climatic change to quantify the net partial effect of climatic change on bilateral migration. Again drawing on panel data from 1960 to 2000, we further exploit the dyadic dimension of our data to highlight the importance of neighbouring countries and former colonial powers in determining the direction of climate-induced emigration. Our baseline results suggest that climatic shocks affect individuals’ financial constraints more than their desire to move. Our key findings are that natural disasters tend to deter emigration but importantly spur emigration to neighbouring countries. For middle-income origins, natural disasters, while deterring migration, foster emigration to former colonial powers.