Revisiting the Migration-Development Nexus: A Gravity Model Approach

Emmanuel Letouzé, Mark Purser, Francisco Rodríguez and Matthew Cummins
Additional contact information
Emmanuel Letouzé: Human Development Report Office (HDRO), United Nations Development Programme
Mark Purser: Human Development Report Office (HDRO), United Nations Development Programme

No HDRP-2009-44, Human Development Research Papers (2009 to present) from Human Development Report Office (HDRO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Abstract: This paper presents empirical estimates of a gravity model of bilateral migration that properly accounts for non-linearities and tackles causality issues through an instrumental variables approach. In contrast to the existing literature, which is limited to OECD data, we have estimated our model using a matrix of bilateral migration stocks for 127 countries. We find that the inverted-U relationship between income at origin and migration found by other authors survives the more demanding bilateral specification but does not survive both instrumentation and introduction of controls for the geographical and cultural proximity between country pairs. We also evaluate the effect of migration on origin and destination country income using the geographically determined component of migration as a source of exogenous variation and fail to find a significant effect of migration on origin or destination income.

Keywords: human development; human mobility; migration; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 F22 O15 O19 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2009-10, Revised 2009-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-mic and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as background research for the 2009 Human Development Report.

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2009/papers/HDRP_2009_44.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Revisiting the Migration-Development Nexus: A Gravity Model Approach (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hdr:papers:hdrp-2009-44

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Human Development Research Papers (2009 to present) from Human Development Report Office (HDRO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by HDRO/UNDP ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).