Migrants and Refugees: Are They Holding Us Back or Pushing Us Forward?

As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West presents a lecture titled Migrants and Refugees: Are they holding us back or pushing us forward? by Brookings Fellow in Global Economy and Development, Dany Bahar. It is often cited that human mobility is key to economic growth and productivity. Evidence also points to the economic costs and benefits of international migration for both the sending and receiving countries. This lecture explores if roads to economic growth and prosperity require restrictions to migration, or quite the contrary

A Roadmap for Immigration Reform: Identifying Weak Links in the Labor Supply Chain

The last time the U.S. enacted major immigration reform was the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Since then, little has been done to fix what has become a broken system despite heated debate at the national, state, and local levels. Unfortunately, the immigration debate has also become increasingly disconnected from the exigencies of the U.S. economy, even in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in which worker shortages and labor market dysfunction have become increasingly glaring. Worse still, the aging U.S. workforce and structural shifts toward a more service-oriented economy will likely deepen much of this dysfunction unless policymakers can agree to major reforms to shore up the U.S. workforce.This report aims to support these necessary reforms by highlighting the areas of the economy that are most in need of workers. Importantly, our approach not only highlights occupations that are—and will continue to be—in greatest demand, but also the occupations that are most complementary to the existing workforce, ensuring that efforts to meet these labor market needs will support all workers. At the core is a framework that we call the Occupational Opportunity Network, which identifies strategic occupations that will be in high demand for the next decade; are historically immigrant intensive; and have a high degree of complementarity with other occupations. In short, we define highly complementary occupations as those that are central to the U.S. workforce in the sense that they are used as inputs to many different industries and, within those industries, tend to augment the employment of other workers

Essays on the Transmission and Diffusion of Productive Knowledge in International Economics

Numerous empirical studies have shown the difficulties associated with the transmission of knowledge and the limitations of its diffusion process. What are the implications of these difficulties and limitations to international economics? This dissertation deals with this question by looking at how productive knowledge plays a role in the evolution of the comparative advantage of nations and the international expansion of multinational corporations. The first chapter finds that a country is 65% more likely to start exporting a good that is being exported by any of its geographic neighbors, consistently with evidence on the limited geographic patterns of knowledge diffusion. The second chapter finds that migrants, serving as carriers of productive knowledge, play a role in explaining the appearances of new export industries in both their sending and receiving countries. In particular, in terms of their ability to induce exports in the average country, an increase of only 65,000 people in the stock of migrants is associated with about 15% increase in the likelihood of adding a new product to a country's export basket. The figure becomes 15,000 for skilled migrants. The third chapter looks at how the barriers to knowledge transmission within the firm limit the horizontal expansion of multinational corporations. The findings suggest that multinational corporations are, on average, about 12% less likely to horizontally expand a sector that is one standard deviation above the mean in the knowledge intensity scale

International Knowledge Diffusion and the Comparative Advantage of Nations

In this paper we document that the probability that a product is added to a country’s export basket is, on average, 65% larger if a neighboring country is a successful exporter of that same product. We interpret our result as evidence of international intra-industry knowledge diffusion. Our results are consistent with the overall consensus in the literature on technology spillovers: diffusion is stronger at shorter distances; is weaker for more knowledge-intensive products; and has become faster over time

Refugees, trade, and FDI

Humanitarian policies aimed at welcoming forced migrants may yield unexpected economic dividends. This article focuses on the trade and investment links forged by refugees between their countries of resettlement and the origins they fled. We document how such immigrant-links differ in the case of refugees, focusing on why their opportunity sets might differ and the difficulties in establishing economic connections against a backdrop of civil conflict and political unrest. We conclude by discussing a range of policies aimed at engaging refugee diasporas to foster development at refugees' origins.</p

Migrants are key to productivity gains for countries

For decades, the focus of the economic literature when studying migration was, for the most part, on the impact it has on labour-related outcomes such as wages and unemployment. But these studies have only been able to tell us one side of the story. As is the case with other flows, such as trade and investment, there are many other aspects of migration that go beyond the localised short-term impact it might have on the labour force. However, there are many reasons to believe that migration may be a highly effective driver of knowledge diffusion across borders, write Dany Bahar (Brookings) and Hillel Rapoport (Paris School of Economics)

What Drives Economic Growth? A Look into Structural Transformation and Export Diversification

As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West invites you to a lecture titled What drives economic growth? A look into structural transformation and export diversification by Brookings Fellow in Global Economy and Development, Dany Bahar. About 60 percent of cross-country income differences can be explained by productivity differences. In the long-run, productivity is what best explains economic growth and welfare. This lecture seeks to understand the drivers of economic and productivity growth for countries, and in particular, the role of structural transformation and diversification. The lecture will draw on work by other scholars as well as original research on the link between diversification and economic growth as well as the determinants of diversification, including the role of migrants in this process