The Impact of Immigration on International Trade: A Meta-Analysis
By Murat Genç, Masood Gheasi, Peter Nijkamp, Jacques Poot. Social Science Research Network, 2011
163 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Since the early 1990s many empirical studies have been conducted on the impact of international migration on international trade, predominantly from the host country perspective. Because most studies have adopted broadly the same specification, namely a log-linear gravity model of export and import flows augmented with the logarithm of the stock of immigrants from specific source countries as an additional explanatory variable, the resulting elasticities are broadly comparable and yield a set of estimates that is well suited to meta-analysis. We therefore compile and analyze in this paper the distribution of immigration elasticities of imports and exports across 48 studies that yielded 300 observations. The results show that immigration complements rather than substitutes for trade flows between host and origin countries. Correcting for heterogeneity and publication bias, an increase in the number of immigrants by 10 percent may be expected to increase the volume of trade on average by about 1.5 percent. However, the impact is lower for trade in homogeneous goods. Over time, the growing stock of immigrants decreases the elasticities. The estimates are affected by the choice of some covariates, the nature of the data (cross-section or panel) and the estimation technique. Elasticities vary between countries in ways that cannot be fully explained by study characteristics; trade restrictions and immigration policies matter for the impact of immigration on trade. The migrant elasticity of imports is larger than that of exports in about half the countries considered, but the publication bias and heterogeneity-corrected elasticity is slightly larger for exports than for imports.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8e8ce2d4094427128733b9d325e8af14c974da1
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Immigration, Trade and Productivity in Services: Evidence from U.K. Firms (2018, unknown): “24 This is somewhat larger than the mean estimate from the Genc et al (2011) meta-analysis of the immigrant impact on goods exports, which found an average 1.5 percent rise in exports for each 10 percent increase in immigration.”
- Does Size Really Matter? On the Relationship between Immigrant Group Size and Anti-Immigrant Prejudice 1 (2017, background): “Citrin et al. (1997) use attitudes toward immigrant eligibility for government services.”
- Migrant Networks and Trade: The Vietnamese Boat People as a Natural Experiment (2018, unknown): “5% rise in that State’s exports to Vietnam, an estimate greater by a factor of five when compared to recent meta-analysis estimates (Genc et al., 2011).”