Publication:
Labor Migration and Economic Growth in East and Southeast Asia

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (958.72 KB)
1,569 downloads
English Text (133.8 KB)
250 downloads
Published
2013-10
ISSN
Date
2014-02-04
Editor(s)
Abstract
East and Southeast Asia face major demographic changes over the next few decades as many countries' labor forces will start to decline, while others will experience higher labor force growth as populations and participation rates increase. A well-managed labor migration strategy presents itself as a mechanism for ameliorating the impending labor shortages in some East-Asia Pacific countries, while providing an opportunity for other countries with excess labor to provide migrant workers that will contribute to the development of the home country through greater remittance flows. Although migration would be unable to offset the economic impacts of the declining labor forces in the countries with shrinking populations, a more flexible migration policy, allowing migrants to respond to the major demographic changes occurring in Asia over the next 50 years, would be beneficial to most economies in the region in terms of real incomes and real gross domestic product over the 2007-2050 period. Such a policy could deeply affect the net migration position of a country. Countries that were net recipients under current migration policies might become net senders under the more liberal policy regime.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Walmsley, Terrie; Aguiar, Angel; Ahmed, S. Amer. 2013. Labor Migration and Economic Growth in East and Southeast Asia. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 6643. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16858 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Intergenerational Income Mobility around the World
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-09) Munoz, Ercio; Van der Weide, Roy
    This paper introduces a new global database with estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 87 countries, covering 84 percent of the world’s population. This marks a notable expansion of the cross-country evidence base on income mobility, particularly among low- and middle-income countries. The estimates indicate that the negative association between income mobility and inequality (known as the Great Gatsby Curve) continues to hold across this wider range of countries. The database also reveals a positive association between income mobility and national income per capita, suggesting that countries achieve higher levels of intergenerational mobility as they grow richer.
  • Publication
    International Activity and Female Labor Participation: New Evidence for Services Firms in Developing Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-03) Luna, Luis Aguilar; Winkler, Deborah Elisabeth
    Using a cross-section of more than 33,000 services firms in 104 low- and middle-income countries from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, this paper examines whether the female labor share premium of international firms relative to non-international firms in manufacturing also holds for services firms. Unlike the manufacturing sector, the paper finds a negative relationship between exporting and global value chain participation and the female labor share for services firms, while no relationship is found for importing or foreign ownership status, controlling for firm output, productivity, technology intensity, and fixed effects. The female labor share gap for exporters was larger before COVID-19, and the gap for global value chain participants is no longer significant after COVID-19. Controlling for sectoral relative wages between men and women does not change the findings in a smaller subsample of economies. Controlling for female top management and ownership reveals a female labor share gap for exporters, global value chain participants, and importers. Using an alternative estimator and data set confirms the female labor share gap in services firms. This may be attributed to the sectoral segregation between women and men, with women tending to pursue work opportunities in less skill- and export-intensive services sectors compared to men.
  • Publication
    Children in Monetary Poor Households: Global, Regional, and Select National Trends in the Progress against Child Poverty
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-05) Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Salmeron Gomez, Daylan Alberto; Engilbertsdottir, Solrun; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Delamonica, Enrique; Yablonski, Jennifer
    This paper presents the first estimates of extreme child poverty and child poverty using the World Bank’s recently revised international poverty lines. Using the international poverty line of $3.00 per day and the higher $8.30 per day poverty line (both expressed in 2021 purchasing power parity), the paper provides new results of the global and regional trends over 2014–24. The estimates show that 19.2 percent of children, approximately 412 million children, were living on less than $3.00 (2021 PPP) per day as of 2024, a reduction from 507 million children in 2014. This long-term decrease was slower than that for the general population. At the higher line of $8.30, the child poverty rate in 2024 was 65.9 percent, representing around 1.4 billion children, a drop from the 73.1 percent registered in 2014. At the regional level, the East Asia and Pacific and South Asia regions witnessed significant reductions in child poverty and extreme child poverty between 2014 and 2024, and the Europe and Central Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean regions showed reductions mostly in child poverty. In the same period, there was an increase in extreme child poverty in the Middle East and North Africa region. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a “lost decade” of child poverty reduction between 2014 and 2024, increasing its concentration of global poverty. In 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa hosted more than three-quarters of children in extreme poor households (more than 311 million children), although its share of the global child population was around 23 percent. Country-level results show evidence of regional heterogeneity in progress against extreme child poverty.
  • Publication
    Engineering Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-29) Akcigit, Ufuk; Kilic, Furkan; Lall, Somik; Shpak, Solomiya
    As Ukraine emerges from the devastation of war, it faces a historic opportunity to engineer its own Wirtschaftswunder—a productivity-driven economic transformation akin to post-war West Germany. While investment-led growth may offer quick wins, it is efficiency, innovation, and institutional reform that will determine Ukraine’s long-term economic trajectory. Drawing on rich micro-level firm data spanning 25 years, this paper uncovers deep structural distortions that have suppressed creative destruction and productivity in Ukraine. It finds that business dynamism is on the decline, alongside rising market concentration among incumbent businesses, including low productivity state owned enterprises. To inform priorities for reviving business dynamism, this study develops a model of creative destruction drawing on Acemoglu et al. (2018) and Akcigit et al. (2021). The quantitative assessment highlights that policies that discipline entrenched incumbents are the bedrock for reviving business dynamism and engineer Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder. Policies targeting specific types of firms have limited efficacy when incumbents run wild.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Managing International Migration for Development in East Asia
    (World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-06) Adams, Richard H., Jr.; Ahsan, Ahmad; Adams, Richard H., Jr.; Ahsan, Ahmad
    The objective of this book is to analyze the economic and social impact of international migration on labor sending and labor receiving countries in the East Asia region. More specifically, the book seeks: (a) to examine the impact of international migration on key development indicators, including poverty, investment, labor force participation, labor productivity and wages; (b) to evaluate current government structures and institutions for managing migration, with a view to identifying future policies for maximizing the benefits of international labor migration. The book includes new work on these key policy issues from six East Asian countries: three labor sending countries (Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam) and three labor receiving countries (Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand).
  • Publication
    Shaping the Future : A Long-Term Perspective of People and Job Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa
    (Washington, DC, 2009-01) World Bank
    The objective of this study is to provide a long-term perspective for the ongoing policy dialogue on the management of labor migration in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. It is organized as follows. Chapter one puts the report and migration in the context of the economic and social development in MENA countries. Chapter two provides the historical context of MENA migration patterns and an overview of the presence and skill characteristics of migrants in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries today. This chapter also discusses the potential for insourcing, that is, migration of jobs into the region as an alternative or complement to labor migration. Chapter three analyzes the demand and supply framework for migration, the determinants of migration patterns, and the potential demand for labor in the European Union (EU), and the characteristics and trends of MENA labor supply. Chapter four looks to the worldwide impact of demographic and labor force developments in the decades ahead and their implications on labor and job mobility. The chapter analyzes the likely population and labor force growth in Europe and MENA, the challenges this growth poses, and the scope for demographic arbitrage between the two regions. This chapter provides the basis for the fifth and concluding chapter. Chapter five covers the institutional setup and the various economic and social protection policies and practices worldwide that have a strong and positive bearing on migration flows and presents a conceptual framework on both the labor and job sending and receiving sides that can be used by policy makers to articulate, defend, and implement a collaborative approach to the challenges ahead.
  • Publication
    Let Workers Move : Using Bilateral Labor Agreements to Increase Trade in Services
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013-06-13) Sáez, Sebastián; Sáez, Sebastián
    Unlike the movement of capital, the movement of labor across countries remains highly restricted-despite the huge global returns to international labor mobility. According to one estimate, allowing the temporary migration of skilled and unskilled workers equivalent to 3 percent of the workforces of the world's developed countries would increase global welfare by more than US$156 billion a year. The objective of this book is to identify and discuss possible options for increasing services trade through the temporary movement of people, as a complement, not a substitute, to what can be achieved at the World Trade Organization (WTO), regional, and bilateral levels through trade agreement. Bilateral labor agreements (BLAs) could play a complementary role provided they are designed with the aim of promoting services trade through the temporary movement of people and fulfill specific requirements, including requirements that ensure temporariness. In general, such agreements have not been designed to promote trade in services; they have traditionally been tailored to facilitate or manage labor migration flows. The book is divided into two parts. Chapters one to three assess what has been achieved so far in trade agreements in terms of the temporary movement of services providers. They also discuss the pros and cons of using BLAs as possible channels for the expansion of trade in services. Chapter's four to eight use case studies to examine the viability and performance of BLAs as a complement to other efforts to liberalize the temporary movement of people. They are based on the experiences of sending and receiving countries in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. BLAs can be an attractive option for middle-income countries whose migratory flows are relatively small and do not generate fears in receiving countries. Source country governments should make credible commitments to ensure the temporary nature of these flows. In conjunction with the private sector, they should establish mechanisms for selecting the sectors to promote in target markets.
  • Publication
    The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership : Trade in Services as an Alternative to Migration?
    (2009-09-01) Hoekman, Bernard; Ozden, Caglar
    This paper discusses options to facilitate movement of workers between high-income and developing countries within the framework of trade agreements, focusing on the European Union s partnership agreements with neighboring countries. Existing frameworks for cooperation offer the possibility of expanding temporary rather than longer-term or permanent movement of workers since extant trade agreements provide scope for negotiating specific market access commitments for services, including those delivered through the cross-border movement of natural persons. Even though the potential for such "embodied" trade in services will not be anywhere near what would be associated with substantial liberalization of migration regimes, furthering the services trade dimension in the European Union s ¬trade agreements offers significant potential Pareto gains. For the partner countries these gains from temporary movement of service providers are both direct - through greater employment in/revenue from providing services in the European Union - and indirect - by helping to increase and sustain higher growth at home.
  • Publication
    The Wage Effects of Immigration and Emigration
    (2011-02-01) Docquier, Frederic; Ozden, Caglar; Peri, Giovanni
    Immigrants in Rome or Paris are more visible to the public eye than the Italian or French engineers in Silicon Valley, especially when it comes to the debate on the effects of immigration on the employment and wages of natives in high-income countries. This paper argues that such public fears, especially in European countries are misplaced; instead, more concern should be directed towards emigration. Using a new dataset on migration flows by education levels for the period 1990-2000, the results show the following: First, immigration had zero to small positive long-run effect on the average wages of natives, ranging from zero in Italy to +1.7 percent in Australia. Second, emigration had a mild to significant negative long-run effect ranging from zero for the US to -0.8 percent in the UK. Third, over the period 1990-2000, immigration generally improved the income distribution of European countries while emigration worsened it by increasing the wage gap between the high and low skilled natives. These patterns hold true using a range of parameters for the simulations, accounting for the estimates of undocumented immigrants, and correcting for the quality of schooling and/or labor-market downgrading of skills. All results go counter to the popular beliefs about migration, but they are due to the higher skill intensity of both emigration and immigration relative to non-migrants.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.