An Incentive Mechanism to Break the Low-skill Immigration Deadlock

David de la Croix and Frédéric Docquier

No 2009028, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: Although movements of capital, goods and services are growing in importance, workers movements are impeded by restrictive policies in rich countries. Such regulations carry substantial economic costs for developing countries, and prevent global inequality from declining. Even if rich countries are averse to global inequality, a single country lacks incentives to welcome additional migrants as it would bear the costs alone while the benefits accrue to all rich states. Aversion to global inequality confers a public good nature to the South-North migration of low-skill workers. We propose an alternative allocation of labor maximizing global welfare subject to the constraints that the rich countries are at least as well off as in the current “nationalist” (or “Nashionalist”) situation. This “no regret” allocation can be decentralized by a tax-subsidy scheme which makes people internalize the fact that as soon as a rich country welcomes an additional migrant, global inequalities are reduced, and everybody in the rich world is better off too. Our model is calibrated using statistics on immigration, working-age population and output. We simulate the proposed scheme on different sets of rich countries.

Keywords: Public Good; Inequality Aversion; Immigration policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D58 D6 D7 F22 F55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26
Date: 2009-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: An Incentive Mechanism to Break the Low-skill Immigration Deadlock (2015)
Working Paper: An incentive mechanism to break the low-skill immigration deadlock (2014)
Working Paper: An Incentive Mechanism to Break the Low-skill Immigration Deadlock (2010)
Working Paper: An incentive mechanism to break the low-skill immigration deadlock (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvir:2009028

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