Here's yet another interesting paper from the Institute for the Study of Labor website. Most empirical models of migration regard it as a one-shot (binary) deal: either people migrate or stay put and that's that. However, this new paper by Govert Bijwaard of Erasmus University adds new wrinkles to an old story. In his empirical model, Bijwaard accounts for differing phenomena to make things more realistic such as identifying permanent and temporary migrants. In this particular study from the Netherlands, he makes use of a proportional hazard model that estimates how likely it is migrants will remain where they have emigrated to. Clearly, policy makers will be interested in matters such as forecasting the probability that migrants will stay behind with regard to planning for tax revenues, social spending, employment levels, pension funding, and a whole host of other important matters. The abstract follows:In this paper we analyze the demographic factors that influence the migration dynamics of recent immigrants to The Netherlands. We show how we can allow for both permanent and temporary migrants. Based on data from Statistics Netherlands we analyze both the departure and the return from abroad for recent non-Dutch immigrants to The Netherlands. Results disclose differences among migrants by migration motive and by country of origin and lend support to our analytical framework. Combining both models, for departure and returning, provides the probability that a specific migrant ends-up in The Netherlands. It also yields a framework for predicting the migration dynamics over the life-cycle. We can conclude that for a complete view of the migration dynamics it is important to allow for both permanent (stayers) migrants and temporary (movers) migrants and that return from abroad should not be neglected.Big differences are found in propensities to stay based on migrant motive and country of origin. For example, students are most prone to leave while migrants with families in the Netherlands are those least prone to leave. Furthermore, migrants from countries that used to send guestworkers in the sixties and seventies to Holland such as Turkey and Morocco are more likely to stay than those from Western countries.
The Institute for the Study of Labor should be congratulated for collecting so many fine papers on important socio-economic matters of global--not just European--interest. And, of course, it provides me with a regular stream of interesting stuff to post about ;-)
