Relative Deprivation and International Migration Intentions : Examining a New Class of Proximity-Sensitive Measures

We examine the links between migration and a novel family of generalized proximity-sensitive relative deprivation measures. We find that higher international migration intentions are associated with higher relative deprivation when people tend to accord increasing weights to comparisons with the considerably wealthier than to those in closer proximity. That lends support to Stark at al (2017)’s “declining proximity-sensitivity” preferences in the context of international migration. Our dataset spans 129 countries, between 2009 and 2017