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On the Economic Geography of International Migration
Author(s) -
Özden Çağlar,
Parsons Christopher
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the world economy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.594
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1467-9701
pISSN - 0378-5920
DOI - 10.1111/twec.12264
Subject(s) - emigration , economics , immigration , context (archaeology) , sovereignty , unemployment , demographic economics , geography , macroeconomics , political science , law , archaeology , politics
We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Z ipf's and G ibrat's laws in the context of aggregate and high‐skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non‐parametric analysis. The top tails of the distributions of aggregate and high‐skilled immigrants and emigrants adhere to a P areto distribution with an exponent of unity, that is Z ipf's law holds. We find some evidence in favour of G ibrat's law holding for immigration stocks, such that the growth in stocks is independent of their initial values and stronger evidence that immigration densities are diverging over time. Conversely, emigrant stocks are converging in the sense that countries with smaller emigrant stocks are growing faster than their larger sovereign counterparts. Lastly, high‐skilled immigration and emigration stocks expressed in levels or as densities all exhibit signs of convergence. We conclude by discussing some competing mechanisms that could be driving the observed patterns including differing fertility rates, reductions in emigration restrictions, migrant sorting and selective immigration policies, immigrant networks and persisting wage differentials.