Determinants of International Labor Migration to Korea

Yoon Ah Oh () and Jione Jung ()
Additional contact information
Yoon Ah Oh: Korea Institute for International Economic Policy
Jione Jung: Korea Institute for International Economic Policy

No 13-8, Working Papers from Korea Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: Since the 1990s Korea has emerged as one of the major migration destinations in Asia. This paper represents one of the first attempts to examine the determinants of bilateral labor migration to Korea across source countries and over time. We analyze the effects of economic, demographic, and policy factors. We also examine the role played by trade between Korea and origin countries. The results suggest that economic fundamentals, including income level in Korea, as well as demographic factors both in origin countries and Korea, play an important role, while different patterns are observed for skilled and unskilled migrant workers. We also found that trade is an important predictor of the size and composition of foreign migrant population in Korea. We speculate that trade influences migration to Korea through the information effect and foreign labor policy channel.

Keywords: International Labor Migration; Determinants; Skilled And Unskilled Labor; Korea (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2013-12-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2452880 Full text (application/pdf)

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:ris:kiepwp:2013_008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Korea Institute for International Economic Policy [30147] 3rd Floor Building C Sejong National Research Complex 370 Sicheong-daero Sejong-si, Korea. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Juwon Seo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).