Cross-national comparison of internal migration: issues and measures

Abstract

Our objectives are to identify the issues that researchers encounter when measuring internal migration in different countries and to propose key indicators that analysts can use to compare internal migration at the 'national' level. We establish the benefits to be gained by a rigorous approach to cross-national comparisons of internal migration and discuss issues that affect such comparisons. We then distinguish four dimensions of internal migration on which countries can be compared and, for each dimension, identify a series of summary measures. We illustrate the issues and measures proposed by comparing migration in Australia and Great Britain. Copyright 2002 Royal Statistical Society.

Out-migration, wealth constraints, and the quality of local amenities

“…The For instance, Bell and Muhidin (2009) show that changing the definition of the migration event from "changed region" to "changed municipality" of residence increases the five-year migration intensity from 2.2% to 9.99% in Brazil, from 6.32% to 16.68% in Chile, and from 3.37% to 16.57% in Canada. Finally, national statistics do not record the movements within geographical units that are implicitly reported in the GWP migration intentions data.…”

“…Specifically, we pool recent (within the last five years) internal migration rates from three sources: World Bank (2009), ECLAC (2007), and Bell and Muhidin (2009), giving priority to the most recent figure for countries referenced in several sources, although the majority of countries are cited in only one of these three, necessitating a choice between sources in only a small number of cases. From these three sources, we also pool a series on the year of the census or survey from which internal migration rates are calculated, which vary considerably from 1992 for El Salvador and…”

“…That is, although international migration rates are reasonably well estimated from national censuses and World Bank surveys (see Docquier and Marfouk, 2006), figures on internal migrations are scarce and cannot be constructed from available data (see Bell and Muhidin, 2009, for a discussion). Yet such an omission may be 5 There is indeed some evidence at the macro level for an inverse U-shaped relation between wealth and migration (see, e.g., de Haas, 2009;Hatton and Williamson, 2002).…”

Location Tracing and Potential Risks in Interaction Data Sets

“…The level of interaction uniqueness given reporting units is one that is hard to compare between countries, given limitations on available data. However, there may be analogies with the use of Courgeau's k to measure the relationship of migration intensities to the number of reporting units (Courgeau 1973) and thus for international comparison (Bell et al 2002).…”

A new area classification for understanding internal migration in Britain

“…For example, in-migration from the 'no usual address' category in the census (which comprise a considerable number of migrants) can also be included. Bell et al (2002) detail a range of different measures which can be computed from flow data such as migration efficiency area connectivity or distance migrated. If the 14 indices outlined by Bell et al (2002) alone were calculated for each variable in Table 1 then it is possible to see that very quickly the number of variables which could potentially be included in a classification becomes huge, numbering in the many thousands.…”