Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of unemployment and labour institutions such as employment protection legislation, coverage of unemployment benefits, minimum wages (MW), union power and tax wedge on migration flows. The authors allow for interactions of these institutions with migration entry laws, as both affect equilibrium wages and employment in destination countries, influencing mobility decisions of immigrants.

The authors use data on migration flows for a sample of 15 OECD countries over the period 1980-2006. The relationship between flows and labour institutions is analysed using OLS techniques and including destination and origin-by-year fixed effects. The coefficients of interest are identified through within country variation. The authors test the robustness of the results to different specifications using, among others, dynamic models for panel data.

The authors find strong and negative effects of unemployment, employment protection and migration policy on flows. The negative effect of migration policy on flows is larger in countries with high than in countries with low employment protection. The authors find positive effects for MW, unemployment benefits and union power. The authors show heterogeneous effects depending on the group of countries of origin and destination.

While the identification strategy allows us to estimate the effects of interest, the baseline estimates may suffer from endogeneity problems in terms of omitted variable bias and reverse causality. The sensitivity checks provide mixed results and show that baseline estimates are not always robust to different specifications. Further work is needed to better address the problem of endogeneity.

The paper adds to the previous literature on the determinants of immigration flows by explicitly considering the labour market environment in destination countries. The results provide insights into potential interaction effects and coordination of reforms in labour markets and immigration policies.

Reviews a number of contributions to migration analysis. Discusses some of the rudiments of migration modelling before turning attention to specific applications. Pays particular attention to articles which have modelled the interaction between labour and housing markets.

The aim of this paper is to estimate the dynamic of international migration between the different regions of the world for 2030 and to measure the impact of different kind of migration policies on the economic and social evolution.

The change and migration forecasting are estimated for regions of the world using macroeconomic Cambridge Alphametrics Model.

The crisis and its aggravation thus clearly favour scenarios of immigration policy along the “zero migration” or “constant migration”. These choices of migration policies reinforce the deflationary process resulting in reduced opportunities for renewed growth in industrial areas and are not offset by the dynamism of growth in emerging countries. Paradoxically, the developed countries which are most durably affected by the crisis are also those that have ageing population and are in high need of skilled and unskilled labor.

Three options are possible: one going along the depressive process by espousing restrictive immigration policies that remain expensive. The second involves a highly selective immigration policy. Under these conditions the demographic revival already appearing would be reinforced by a rejuvenation of the population brought about by a more open immigration policy. Political and institutional factors play a fundamental role in the emergence of this optimistic assumption and the rise of isolationism in Europe and the ghettoization of suburban areas can hinder the application of such a policy of openness to migration. The third scenario, the mass migration scenario, allows letting go of the growth related constraints and getting out of the deflationist spiral. This pro-active approach could cause public opinions to change in line with public interest. This scenario of mass migration has more of a chance to see the light under a growth hypothesis. However, restrictive policies weaken the prospects of sustainable recovery causing a vicious cycle that can only be broken by pro-active policies or by irresistible shocks.

From specific estimations, four immigration regimes have been built that cut across the major regions of the model: the “core skill replacement migration regime” based on selective policies using migration to fill high-skilled labor needs (United Kingdom, West and Northern Europe, Canada, Australia, and USA), “mass immigration and replacement” applies to South Europe, East Asia High Income, and part of West Asia (Gulf countries), “big fast-growing emerging regions of future mass immigration,” notably China, India and “South-South migration” based on forced migration much of it by climate change, which may likely occur in South Asia, part of West Asia, and, most of Africa (without South Africa). Migrations in transit countries (Central America to USA, and East Europe to UK and West Europe) are based on low skilled migrants in labor-intensive sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue by problematising labour agency, precariousness, and labour fragmentation as defining themes of the interplay between employment relations, migration and mobility.

Drawing from discussions about the impact of globalisation on changes in features of work and employment, and bringing together theory and research on employment relations and labour migration, the paper discusses the relational spatial and temporal nature of agency, the diverse features of worker experiences of precariousness, and the resulting fragmentation in labour solidarity.

Labour agency, precariousness and labour fragmentation intersect to create the axis of dynamics of hardship and abuse that dominate work experiences of migrant workers in the global labour market. Globalisation has a pervasive impact in articulating and perpetuating systemic processes of closure, entrapment and containment, which are triggered by migration and legitimised by dynamics of employment relations.

The paper contributes to current discussions about the interplay between migration, mobility and employment relations and sets out future directions of research to enhance our understanding of the role of employment relations to perpetuate, legitimise and normalise dynamics of globalisation that promote the migrant division of labour and create contradictory labour demands and displacements in the global labour market.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the impact of return migration on the occupational choice in rural China.

The authors’ research uses the two‐stage residuals inclusion estimation, 2SRI, to deal with the endogeneity problem, and then compares the occupational choice between returnees and stayers with multinomial logit estimation and counterfactual analysis.

The authors mainly find that: the migration experience has a significant positive impact on wage‐employment activities, but may be has a negative effect on the entrepreneurial activities. The workers engaged in non‐agricultural activities (self‐employment and wage‐employment) have the same characteristics in the labor market (i.e. younger, male, higher education levels, less average land and parents with little children) compared to the agricultural activities, but these characteristics show no significant affect on the occupation choice between self‐employment and wage‐employment.

This paper extends the empirical analysis in internal migration, but it also has some drawbacks, such as not enough data can be obtained to distinguish the occupations between different types of self‐employment as own account workers and as entrepreneurs. Further research needs more comprehensive data to support.

The authors’ research is the first study which uses self‐selection model to examine the activity choice of return migrants in rural China. They also extend the existing studies in two directions: first, they use nationally‐representative data from the general social survey of China carried out in 2006 to examine the relationship between the return rural migrants and their occupational choices. Second, they propose a more exact category for rural occupational choice including non‐agricultural activities (self‐employee, wage‐employment) and agricultural activities (peasants).

The purpose of this paper is to break down south-north migration along both the skill and the occupational dimension and thus to distinguish and compare several types of south-north migration and brain drain.

This paper presents south-north migration rates by occupational category at two distinct levels of disaggregation according to International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 (ISCO-88). The data sets combine information about the labor market outcomes of immigrants in Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries around the year 2000 provided by the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries by the OECD with employment data for the developing migrant-sending countries from the International Labour Organization.

The incidence of south-north migration was highest among Professionals, one of the two occupational categories generally requiring tertiary education, and among clerks and legislators, senior officials and managers. At the more disaggregated level, physical, mathematical and engineering science (associate) professionals, life science and health (associate) professionals, as well as other (associate) professionals exhibited significantly larger brain drain rates than teaching (associate) professionals. The data also suggest non-negligible occupation-education mismatches due to the imperfect transferability of skills acquired through formal education because south-north migrants with a university degree worked more often in occupational categories requiring less than tertiary education compared to OECD natives. The employment shares of most types of professionals and technicians and associate professionals, as well as of clerks and corporate managers were significantly smaller in the migrant-sending countries compared to the receiving countries.

The constructed data sets constitute the first comprehensive data sets on south-north migration by ISCO-88 major and sub-major occupational category for cross-sections of, respectively, 91 and 17 developing countries of emigration.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine which factors are important in determining the post-migration education among rural-urban migrants in Indonesia. Second, to investigate whether investing in post-migration education in the cities improves the labour market performances of rural-urban migrants. The labour market performances are measured by the occupational (work) statuses and earnings (wages) at destination.

The determinants of post-migration education are estimated using a binary probit and ordinary least square, while a multinomial logit model and a two-step procedure of Lee’s selection-biased correction based on the multinomial logit are used to examine the effects of post-migration education on the labour market performances of migrants measured by occupational status and by wages. The main source of the data used in this study is the Rural-Urban Migration in China and Indonesia (RUMiCI) 2009-2011 survey conducted in the four largest recent migrant destination cities in Indonesia including Tangerang, Medan, Samarinda, and Makassar.

Post-migration education contributes significantly to the labour market performance in terms of work status and wages, compared to pre-migration education. In terms of work status, migrants with more post-migration education are more likely to be employed in the formal sector compared to migrants with less or no post-migration education. Relating to earnings, migrants with more post-migration education also tend to be paid more than those migrants with less or no post-migration education.

The role of post-migration education in the case of rural-urban migration particularly in developing countries is a relatively neglected area of research. One possible reason is because of the lack of data for rural-urban migration particularly in the case of developing countries. This study is taking advantage by using a new data set from RUMiCI focusing specifically on the rural-urban migrants in the four largest recent migrant destination cities in Indonesia including Tangerang, Medan, Samarinda, and Makassar.

Seasonal labour migration is a common form of temporary migration where the work of the migrant labour depends on seasonal conditions and is performed only during that period of year. This paper aims to identify the factors and subfactors of temporary labour migration from the existing literature.

The paper is based on an extensive review of the literature on temporary labour migration. Studies done from 1990 to 2016 were considered for review. The literatures from research articles, book chapters, working papers, conference papers and field-based project reports from various disciplines, like economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and management studies were reviewed for critically analysing various factors affecting seasonal labour migration.

A total of five key factors and 60 subfactors of temporary labour migration were documented from previous studies. The findings of the study are organized under five thematic segments: economic factors, social factors, environmental factors, policy-related factors and psychological factors New aspects of seasonal migration were identified such as “role of labour contractors ”, “inter-generational mobility”, “social networks”, “grassroot politics”, “migrant’s relationship with the agents”, “labour registration process”, “market intervention” and “civil society intervention” after consultation with the subject experts and field study.

The paper restricts itself to include aspects of temporary labour migration. Only the factors and subfactors affecting temporary migration are taken into purview. Further the findings of the paper can be empirically tested to know the significance of each factor and subfactor.

The paper has implications for better understanding of the temporary labour migration process in different context by focussing extensively on the factors of migration. The factors identified can be empirically tested in regional and local context, which would provide effective insights for policy formulation for the welfare and protection of the migrant workers.

The paper fulfils an identified need to provide a holistic review for understanding and documenting various factors and subfactors that affect the process of temporary labour migration.

The paper examines the effect of internal remittances on the employment choices of household heads in rural Ghana.

The paper employs data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 6) of the Ghana Statistical Service. Due to issues of endogeneity of remittances in relation to labor supply, the paper adopts an instrumental variable approach in the analysis. First, employment choices are categorized into three: (1) wage/salary employment, (2) self-employment and (3) domestic/family employment. The relationship is then modeled as instrumental variable multinomial probit (IV-MNP). Secondly, employment choices are recategorized into two: farm employment and otherwise and modeled as instrumental variable probit (IV-PROBIT). The models are estimated via the conditional mixed process (CMP) estimation technique.

The results indicate that remittances have a negative effect on self-employment and a positive effect on domestic/family employment. Thus, remittances reduce participation in self-employment but increase participation in domestic/family employment. Furthermore, remittances have a negative effect on participation in farm employment. The results are robust to different measures of remittances: receipt of remittances (dummy) and remittance income.

The results suggest that remittances are used for consumption rather than investing in earning activities. In general, engaging in earning type of employment, whether farm and nonfarm employment will decline with receipt of remittances in rural Ghana. There is a need for policy attention with the increasing migration of people out of rural areas.

Prior to this study, little was known on the effect of internal remittances on labor supply decisions of remittance recipients in Ghana, particularly rural Ghana. This paper contributes significantly to filling this knowledge gap.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the development of China's rural labor markets and the identification of the important factors that affect rural labor's off-farm employment and migration.

Based on a set of long-term panel data, this paper makes a clear judgment on the trend of rural labor transfer. High-quality survey design makes it possible to examine the development of the rural labor market from multiple dimensions. Adding household fixed effects to the empirical model alleviates endogenous problems.

The authors find that the increasing trend toward off-farm employment, which is dominated by migration, has continued. There are some other important findings: (1). young male workers dominated off-farm employment, but the gap between groups continues to narrow; (2). the structure of employment is a good response to the economic transformation and (3). the quality of off-farm laborers, especially in terms of human capital, has also enhanced significantly and has continued to support off-farm employment and migration. These findings all indicate that the China's rural labor markets have been constantly improving in recent years, although there is still segmentation.

It is the first paper that uses a nationally representative survey data to address the development of rural labor market in the 21st century. With the help of a long-term panel data structure and by controlling the household-level fixed-effect, the authors obtained a deeper and more robust conclusion. Specifically, this article finds that whether it is for the off-farm transfer or the migration, the influence of labor age, gender, human capital and marital status is gradually weakening.