Why Has UK Net Immigration Increased?

Since the 1970s Britain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, with a trend increase in the net balance of about 100,000 per year. This paper represents the first attempt comprehensively to model the variations in net migration for British and for foreign citizens, across countries and over time. A simple economic model, which includes the selection effects of differing income distributions at home and abroad, largely accounts for the variations in the data. The results suggest that improved economic performance in the UK relative to overseas has tended to increase immigration. But a more important influence, especially on the reduced out-migration of British citizens, has been growing UK inequality. By contrast, shifts in immigration policies at home and abroad seem to have been relatively unimportant.

The Cliometrics of International Migration: A Survey

This is a survey of some of the key studies in the literature on international migration in history that may be described as cliometric. This literature uses the concepts and approaches of applied economics to investigate a range of historical issues and there are strong parallels with the questions that have been addressed in the literature on contemporary migrations. Here I focus on the period 1850 to 1940 and chiefly on migration from Europe to the New World. The survey is organised around six themes that include: the forces driving migration, over time and across space; the assimilation of migrants and their effects on wages and income distribution in source and destination countries; and the evolution of immigration policy. While this literature has drawn heavily on the tool kit of applied economists it also provides a wider perspective on many of the issues that concern migration today.international migration, economic history

Infant Mortality and the Health of Survivors: Britain 1910-1950

The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid improvements in the health and height of British children. Average height and health can be related to infant mortality through a positive selection effect and a negative scarring effect. Examining town-level panel data on the heights of school children I find no evidence for the selection effect but some support for the scarring effect. The results suggest that the improvement in the disease environment, as reflected by the decline in infant mortality, increased average height by about half a centimeter per decade in the first half of the twentieth century.health in Britain, heights of children, infant mortality

What Fundamentals Drive World Migration?

Governments in the OECD note rising immigration with alarm and grapple with policies aimed at selecting certain migrants and keeping out others. Economists appear to be well armed to advise governments since they are responsible for an impressive literature that examines the characteristics of individual immigrants, their absorption and the consequences of their migration on both sending and receiving regions. Economists are, however, much less well armed to speak to the determinants of the world migrations that give rise to public alarm. This paper offers a quantitative assessment of the economic and demographic fundamentals that have driven and are driving world migration, across different historical epochs and around the world. The paper is organized around three questions: How do the standard theories of migration perform when confronted with evidence drawn from more than a century of world migration experience? How do inequality and poverty influence world migration? Is it useful to distinguish between migration pressure and migration ex-post, or between the potential demand for visas and the actual use of them?

Unemployment and the UK Labour Market Before, During and After the Golden Age

During the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s unemployment in Britain averaged 2 per cent. This was far lower than ever before or since and a number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for this unique period in labour market history. But there has been little attempt to isolate precisely how the determinants of wage setting and unemployment differed before, during and after the golden age. We estimate a two-equation model over the whole period from 1872 to 1999 using a newly constructed set of long-run labour market data. We find that the structure of real wage setting was different in the golden age, consistent with notions about the postwar consensus, but it did not result in wages that were significantly lower relative to productivity than during other eras. Rapid growth in productivity and world trade together with low interest rates did keep unemployment lower during the golden age than after the 1970s. But the key difference between the golden age and the periods before and after was shifts in labour demand that are not accounted for by any of the variables that are usually thought to determine the equilibrium unemployment rate

Immigration and Inter-Regional Mobility in the UK, 1982-2000

The possible effects of higher immigration, raising unemployment and lowering earnings for locals, has been a contentious empirical issue and it has recently come to the fore in Britain. Most studies that look across local labour markets, chiefly for the US but recently for the UK, have found the effects of immigration to be benign. One possibility is that an influx of immigrants from abroad to a specific area simply pushes non-immigrants onwards to other localities and thereby spreads the labour market effects over the whole economy. We investigate this issue looking at net internal migration across 11 UK regions over two decades. While we find consistently negative crowding out effects, the results are not statistically very strong. Neither are they enhanced when embedded in a model that includes other variables that drive inter-regional migration or one that examines bilateral population flows between regions. We conclude that this particular channel of adjustment is fairly weak.UK immigration, inter-regional migration

Immigrants Assimilate as Communities, not just as Individuals

There is a large econometric literature that examines the economic assimilation of immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. On the whole immigrants are seen as atomistic individuals assimilating in a largely anonymous labour market, a view that runs counter to the spirit of the equally large literature on ethnic groups. Here we argue that immigrants assimilate as communities, not just as individuals. The longer the immigrant community has been established the better adjusted it is to the host society and the more the host society comes to accept that ethnic group. Thus economic outcomes for immigrants should depend not just on their own characteristics, but also on the legacy of past immigration from the same country. In this paper we test this hypothesis using data from a 5 percent sample of the 1980, 1990 and 2000 US censuses. We find that history matters in immigrant assimilation: the stronger is the tradition of immigration from a given source country, the better the economic outcomes for new immigrants from that source.immigrant earnings, migration history, ethnic groups.

What Fundamentals Drive World Migration?

migration, poverty, demographic economics, emigration, immigration

Vanishing Third World Emigrants?

This paper documents a stylized fact: the Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate those trends. The paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving these emigration life cycles to the United States since 1970 – income and education gaps between the US and the sending country, poverty traps and the size of the cohort at risk in the sending country, and the migrant stock in the US. It then projects the life cycle up to 2024. The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next two decades will not increase, after which it will decline. It also suggests that future US immigrants will be more African and less Hispanic than in the past.Third World, emigration, development, life cycle