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Requiem for the Net Migrant
Author(s) -
Rogers Andrei
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
geographical analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.773
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1538-4632
pISSN - 0016-7363
DOI - 10.1111/j.1538-4632.1990.tb00212.x
Subject(s) - net migration rate , perspective (graphical) , internal migration , settlement (finance) , econometrics , variable (mathematics) , population , economic geography , focus (optics) , net (polyhedron) , dynamics (music) , economics , sociology , computer science , population growth , mathematics , demography , artificial intelligence , mathematical analysis , pedagogy , physics , geometry , finance , optics , payment
Despite recent research that has demonstrated the clear superiority of a multiregional perspective in measuring and projecting the dynamics of internal migration flows, many scholars continue to adopt the uniregional perspective that is forced to focus on net migrants, a nonexistent category of individuals. Net migration models are misspecified because the rates that they use confound changing migration propensities with changing population stocks. Moreover, they obscure regularities in age profiles of migration and thereby further misspecify the spatial dynamics generating observed settlement patterns. Thus, the use of the net migration rate as the dependent variable in explanatory models of migration can produce a misspecification of the fundamental relationships that are the subject of inquiry. This paper considers deficiencies of the net migration concept and illustrates them with numerical examples.