News Sentiment in Destination Countries and Migration Choices: Evidence from Libya

Michele Di Maio, Nelly Youssef Louis William Elmallakh and Valerio Leone Sciabolazza

No 10754, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Changes in the sentiment of migration-related news published in destination countries affect the timing of migrants’ journeys to these countries. Using geo-localized data on migrants in Libya and the complete record of news articles in their country of destination, this paper shows that a worsening news sentiment leads to migrants staying longer in Libya, slowing down their journeys to their final destinations. The paper validates these results by showing that the effect is concentrated in locations with internet connections. The results indicate that changes in news sentiment have a significant impact only for some groups of migrants and under specific conditions, suggesting a limited effect on overall migrant movements. Finally, the paper provides suggestive evidence that a worsening news sentiment in the preferred destination induces substitution across destination countries, yet it does not make migrants return to their country of origin.

Date: 2024-04-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/09952730 ... 5f71a49e5ec89065.pdf (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:wbk:wbrwps:10754

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().