What is the future of international migration flows? The growing availability of bilateral international migration data has resulted in an improved understanding of the determinants of migration flows through the estimation of theory-based gravity models. However, the use of these models as a...

How does immigration affect incomes in the countries migrants go to, and how do rising incomes shape emigration from the countries they leave? The answers depend on whether people who migrate have higher or lower productivity than people who do not migrate. Theory on this subject has long...

Empirical research on the determinants of international migration including the LDCs has so far neglected one important issue: the complex relationship of development and migration. Since the beginning of the 1990s several arguments have been discussed which hint at the possibility that progress...

Slow onset climate change has the potential to cause significant migration flows. Scientists have recently made considerable efforts to quantify these flows based on empirical methods. However, the literature on international migration has failed to come to a clear conclusion as many studies...

Fifty years ago, China sent more than 16 million urban youths aged 16-19 to rural villages to work and they spent between 1 and 10 years there. This is known as the "sent-down youth" (SDY) program. This paper examines how this internal migration impacted rural economic development in the regions...

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...

This paper critiques the last decade of research on the effects of high-skill emigration from developing countries, and proposes six new directions for fruitful research. The study singles out a core assumption underlying much of the recent literature, calling it the Lump of Learning model of...

We provide an assessment of the state of scholarly and policy debates on migrant entrepreneurs in development. They are often described as super-entrepreneurs who contribute to development through (i) being more entrepreneurial than natives; (ii) providing remittances that fund start-ups in...

International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending communities and countries. However, there are also concerns about potential costs of...

Emigration first increases before decreasing with economic development. This bell-shaped relationship between emigration and development was first hypothesized by the theory of the mobility transition (Zelinsky, 1971). Although several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the upward segment...