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“Where on earth is everybody?” The evolution of global bilateral migration: 1960-2000

Where on earth is everybody? The evolution of global bilateral migration: 1960-2000, Çağlar Özden, Christopher Parsons, Maurice Schiff, Terrie Walmsley, 6 August 2011

  • “Until recently, efforts to construct bilateral migration datasets focused on the OECD countries as the destinations (OECD 2002, 2008), often including some disaggregation by other correlates such as age of entry, education, and gender. These data have informed the policy debate about various aspects of migration, for example the importance of various forms of brain drain (Beine et al. 2007, Bhargava and Docquier 2008) and the role of remittances (Ratha and Shaw 2008). We still lack a comprehensive overview of the evolution of migration patterns across geographic regions or income groups. In recent research (Özden et al. 2011), we try to address this gap in our knowledge. We construct five 226-by-226 bilateral matrices of migration stocks by gender for each decade. We use the raw data from over 1,000 national censuses and population registers and then perform various numerical exercises to fill the gaps in the data. The main source for the raw data is The Global Migration Database which is the foremost depository of primary data on international migration and is maintained by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). Because the data covering migrant destinations in these thousands of separate national censuses are not directly comparable – and therefore not suitable for analysis – a major effort has been devoted to harmonising the matrices and verifying the reliability of the resulting estimates.”
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