Does Development Reduce Migration?
By Michael A. Clemens. Social Science Research Network, 2014
194 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The most basic economic theory suggests that rising incomes in developing countries will deter emigration from those countries, an idea that captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. A lengthy literature and recent data suggest something quite different: that over the course of a "mobility transition", emigration generally rises with economic development until countries reach upper-middle income, and only thereafter falls. This note quantifies the shape of the mobility transition in every decade since 1960. It then briefly surveys 45 years of research, which has yielded six classes of theory to explain the mobility transition and numerous tests of its existence and characteristics in both macro- and micro-level data. The note concludes by suggesting five questions that require further study.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3e999162f86f196a5cce745da55015453012820
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In Sociology and Political Science
- C. Cattaneo
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- M. Tabellini
- Francesco Bosello
- Ethan G. Lewis
- Michel Beine
- Lionel Jeusette
Citations in the corpus
- Wealth Heterogeneity and the Income Elasticity of Migration (2017, background): “Clemens (2014) details contradictory results on the sign and magnitude of the income elasticity of migration.”
- Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets (2016, background): “Emigration to high-income countries is better described (as in Clemens 2014) as a phase in the economic development of a country, rather than an escape valve for countries most deeply mired in poverty.”
- The Migration Response to Increasing Temperatures (2016, background): “The finding is clearly related to the widespread regularity (summarized for instance in Clemens, 2014) that emigration rates have a hump-shaped relation with income per person in the country-of-origin.”
- A theory of migration: the aspirations-capabilities framework (2021, unknown): “These empirical analyses confirmed migration transition theory and were further validated by subsequent studies (Clemens 2014, 2020; de Haas and Fransen 2018).”