Trade and Development
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The Trade and Development Series seeks to provide objective, accessible information about the new trade agenda. Titles in the series cover a wide range of topics, from regional trade agreements and customs reform to agriculture, intellectual property rights, services, and other key issues currently being discussed in World Trade Organization negotiations. Contributors to the series represent some of the world’s leading thinkers and specialists on international trade issues. Titles in this series undergo internal and external review under the management of the Trade Group's Advisory Board in the World Bank's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network.
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Publication
International Migration, Economic Development and Policy
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)This volume reflects the expansion of the World Bank Research Program on International Migration and Development into new substantive and geographic areas. It presents a new global migration database and includes studies of the determinants and impact of return and circular migration, the impact of the flow of ideas on fertility, host country policies and their impact on immigrants, and the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty and other development indicators. The studies cover countries from Latin America, North Africa, South Asia, the South Pacific, and Western Europe, and show that the impact of migration on education and health tends to benefit girls more than boys, that its impact on labor force participation tends to be stronger for women than men, that return migrants tend to do better than non-migrants, and that fertility has tended to decline in countries whose migration has been to the West and has failed to do so in countries whose migration has been to the Gulf. The purpose of the case studies is to illustrate and clarify many theoretical mechanisms and to advance understanding of the impact of different migration policies, given that introducing policy variables in econometric regressions is generally difficult. Each study in this volume aims to answer a variety of development- and policy-related questions using the most appropriate of these three methodologies. These empirical studies and analyses include exploration of some novel hypotheses; they are also new in terms of the topics selected and the regions/ countries examined -
Publication
The International Migration of Women
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Women now account for nearly half of all international migration. Theoretical and empirical models that omit gendered determinants and impacts of migration are missing key elements of the story. Women's roles in destination labor markets and in remittance flows-to cite just two examples-are crucial to understanding the development impacts of international migration. This volume surveys the state of our knowledge and provides new research on the gendered determinants and impacts of migration and remittances as well as on the patterns of labor market participation of women migrants. It also sketches a road map for future research on gender and international migration. This research on women and international migration illustrates the type of analytical work that can shape policies to economically empower women migrants as well as women left behind by male migration. It is authors' hope that such analysis will lead to policies that boost productivity, raise incomes, and improve welfare in both sending and receiving countries. This volume addresses several issues. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the volume; it includes a description of methodology, data, main results, and conclusions from the six remaining chapters. The second chapter reviews the existing research on gender and international migration and can be considered a starting point for the remaining chapters. The third chapter focuses on the gendered determinants of migration and remittances in rural Mexico, an important sending country. The following two chapters (chapters 4 and 5) address the impact of migration and remittances on sending countries and provide analysis of household- level data from Ghana and Mexico. Chapter 6 turns to the labor market participation and performance of female migrants in a major destination country, the United States. The volume concludes with a forward-looking chapter that summarizes the major findings, links those to migration policy, and outlines some of the important research and policy issues that need to be addressed in the future. -
Publication
International Migration, Remittances, and the Brain Drain
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Knowledge of the economic effects of migration, especially its impact on economic development, is rather limited. In order to expand knowledge on migration, and identify policies and reforms that would lead to superior development outcomes, this volume presents the results of a first set of studies carried out on the subject. Current demographic trends in both developed and developing countries are pointing toward significant, potential economic gains from migration. The labor forces in many developed countries are expected to peak around 2010, and decline by around 5 percent in the following two decades, accompanied by a rapid increase in dependency ratios. Conversely, the labor forces in many developing countries are expanding rapidly, resulting in declines in dependency ratios. This imbalance is likely to create strong demand for workers in developed countries' labor markets, especially for numerous service sectors that can only be supplied locally. There are large north-south wage gaps, however, especially for unskilled and semiskilled labor. Part 1 of this book, Migration and Remittances, examines the determinants of migration, and the impact of migration and remittances on various development indicators, and measures of welfare. Among these are poverty and inequality; investments in education, health, housing and other productive activities; entrepreneurship; and child labor and education. It focuses on different source countries, use data collected via different methodologies, and employ different econometric tools. Their results, however, are surprisingly consistent. Part 2, Brain Drain, Brain Gain, Brain Waste, focuses on issues related to the migration of skilled workers, that is, the brain drain. It presents the most extensive database on bilateral skilled migration to date, and also examines a number of issues associated with the brain drain, that have not been emphasized in the literature so far, uncovers a number of interesting and unexpected patterns, and, provides answers to some of the debates. This volume deals essentially with economically motivated south-north migration, whose principal cause is, in most cases, the difference in (the present value of) expected real wages, adjusted for migration costs.