Migration, the Quality of the Labour Force and Economic Inequality

Martin Kahanec and Klaus F. Zimmermann ()

No 3560, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: Mobility of workers involves flows of labour, human capital and other production factors and thus contributes to a more efficient allocation of resources. Besides these effects on allocative efficiency, migrant flows affect relative wages and also change the international and national distribution of skills and thereby equality in the receiving society. This paper suggests that skilled immigration promotes economic equality in advanced economies under standard conditions. The context is theoretically explained in a core model and empirically documented using unique data from the WIID database and OECD.

Keywords: inequality; income distribution; human capital; skill allocation; migration; ethnicity; minority; Gini-coefficient (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D33 E25 F22 J15 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lab and nep-mig
Date: 2008-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (3) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3560.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Migration, the Quality of the Labour Force and Economic Inequality (2008)
Working Paper: Migration, the Quality of the Labour Force and Economic Inequality (2008)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3560

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().