The Impact of the Movement of Labour: Results from a Model of Bilateral Migration Flows

Terrie Walmsley (), L. Winters and Syud Ahmed

Global Economy Journal, 2011, vol. 11, issue 4, 24

Abstract: The economics literature increasingly recognizes the importance of migration. In this paper, a bilateral global migration model is developed to investigate the impact of lifting restrictions on the movement of labour. Quotas on skilled and unskilled labour in the developed economies are increased by 3% of their labour forces, with the additional labour supplied by developing economies.This paper improves upon the previous work of Walmsley and Winters (2005). A critical weakness of the previous work was that it was unable to capture the impacts of specific bilateral migration flows or liberalizations between countries. This paper uses a bilateral global migration model that exploits migration data obtained from Parsons, Skeldon, Winters, and Walmsley (2007) that allow the model to account for bilateral migration flows.The results confirm that restrictions on migration impose significant costs on nearly all countries, with the modest liberalization increasing global GDP by US$ 288 billion. All of the developed (labour importing) economies gain in terms of real incomes. While results differ across the developing (labour exporting) economies, most gain as a result of the higher remittances sent home.JEL: F22, C68, 015

Keywords: GATS Mode 4; real income; migration; applied general equilibrium modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1524-5861.1738 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
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:bpj:glecon:v:11:y:2011:i:4:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/gej/html

DOI: 10.2202/1524-5861.1738

Access Statistics for this article

Global Economy Journal is currently edited by Jannett Highfill

More articles in Global Economy Journal from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().