Demographic and Economic Pressure on Emigration Out of Africa

By Tim Hatton, Jeffrey G. Williamson. Social Science Research Network, 2003

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low-wage sending regions (directly augmenting the supply of potential movers as well as indirectly making already-measured employment conditions less attractive). These two features are even more prominent in Africa today, but do or can Africans respond to them with the same elasticity as in the days of "free" migration? Our new estimates of net migration and labor market performance for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa suggest that exactly the same forces are at work driving African across-border migration today. Rapid growth in the cohort of young potential migrants, population pressure on the resource base, and poor economic performance are the main forces driving African migration. A century ago, more modest demographic forces in Europe were accompanied by strong catching-up economic growth in the low-wage emigrant regions, followed by a slowdown in already-modest demographic growth. Yet, migrations were still mass. In Africa today, economic growth has faltered, its economies have fallen further behind the high-wage OECD leaders, and there is a demographic speed up in the making. Our estimates suggest that the pressure on emigration out of Africa will intensify, manifested in part by a growing demand for entrance into high-wage OECD labor markets.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c1059d4f4446316d187cb0dd75de038e45419576

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Citations in the corpus

Africa's Exodus : Capital Flight and the Brain Drain as Portfolio Decisions (2004, background): “Hatton and Williamson (2001, 2002a) find that real wage gaps between Africa and the US, and demographic booms in African countries (the same forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century) are the main forces driving African migration, and they predict that emigration pressures…”
Migration and Development: Dissecting the Anatomy of the Mobility Transition (2017, background): “Similarly, [40] predicted that rapid growth in the cohort of potential young emigrants coupled with slow economic growth will likely intensify emigration pressures from Africa to high-wage OECD countries over the preceding two decades.”
Does Development Reduce Migration? (2014, background): “Hatton and Williamson (1994) find that in pre-1913 European emigration, the inverted-U “emigration lifecycle” was shaped by structural transformation and demographic change at the origin and by networks of previous migrants at the destination (helping migrants reduce credit constraints and informati”
The Impact of Weather Anomalies on Migration in sub-Saharan Africa (2012, methodology): “Moreover, like Hatton and Williamson [41], we account for refugees who are driven by non-economic factors and who are included in the net migration estimates.”
What Fundamentals Drive World Migration (2002, unknown): “Source: This is a variant of the model presented in Hatton and Williamson (2001).”
Winners and Losers Over Two Centuries of Globalization (2002, unknown): “These two fundamentals are even more prominent in Africa today, and recent work suggests that Africans seem to be just as responsive to them as were Europeans a century ago (Hatton and Williamson 2001, 2002).”
International migration: a panel data analysis of the determinants of bilateral flows (2010, unknown): “29In contrast with my results—which are not significant— Hatton and Williamson (2003 ) a nd Pedersen et al. (2004) find evidence of an inverted U-shaped effect on emigration of the origin country’s economic conditions.”
Seeking asylum in Europe (2004, unknown): “Studies of refugee flights from origin countries find, not surprisingly, that civil wars and political genocides are the most important causes of refugee flights from a given source country (Schmeidl, 1997; Hatton and Williamson, 2003).”
International Migration: A Panel Data Analysis of Economic and Non-Economic Determinants (2005, unknown): “Clark, Hatton, and Williamson (2002) and Hatton and Williamson (2002) model immigration policy as affecting the level Ci of migration costs.”