Integrated Modelling of Age and Sex Patterns of European Migration

Abstract

Summary. Age and sex patterns of migration are essential for understanding drivers of population change and heterogeneity of migrant groups. We develop a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate such patterns for international migration in the European Union and European Free Trade Association from 2002 to 2008, which was a period of time when the number of members expanded from 19 to 31 countries. Our model corrects for the inadequacies and inconsistencies in the available data and estimates the missing patterns. The posterior distributions of the age and sex profiles are then combined with a matrix of origin-destination flows, resulting in a synthetic database with measures of uncertainty for migration flows and other model parameters.

Migration from New-Accession Countries and Duration Expectancy in the EU-15: 2002–2008

“…Data on migration come from the IMEM project (Raymer et al 2013; Wiśniowski et al forthcoming), and include age-specific distributions of counts of country-to-country migration for each pair of countries in the EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA), as well as a residual “rest of world” category, each year from 2002 to 2008. Age-specific death counts for EU/EFTA countries are taken from Eurostat, and, for the rest of the world, are derived from estimates provided by the United Nations (UN) by subtracting deaths in EU/EFTA countries from world totals.…”

“…Our work builds on previous research by DeWaard and Raymer (2012) and DeWaard (2013), but with a different and substantially improved set of harmonised age-specific migration flow estimates obtained from the IMEM project, which incorporated a data measurement model, information from experts, and measures of uncertainty (Raymer et al 2013; Wiśniowski et al forthcoming). In what follows, we detail our approach to estimating duration expectancy in EU-15 countries among persons from new-accession countries, including summary measures and the data and model used.…”

Measuring flows of international migration

“…Previous work of the author together with Jakub Bijak, Joop de Beer, Jon Forster, Peter Smith, Rob van der Erf, and Arkadiusz Wiśniowski contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [1], [2], [10], [11].…”

“…Using such synthetic estimates as a means of understanding migration represents a radically different practice than what currently exists. However, recent research on European migration has shown the advantages of doing so [2], [11], namely a consistent and comparable set of flows that can be used to understand migration processes and to assess migration policies across countries. Considerable efforts will be needed to apply these tools to other regions in the world, where international migration flow data are even sparser.…”

“…Since 2007, there have been two international and interdisciplinary research projects focused on modeling migration flows in Europe [9]: Migration Modelling for Statistical Analyses (MIMOSA) conducted from January 2007 to December 2009 [2], [10] and Integrated Modelling of European Migration (IMEM) conducted from November 2009 to April 2012 [1], [11], [12]. The IMEM project differed from the MIMOSA project by modelling the measurement aspects of data, incorporating expert information, and including measures of uncertainty.…”