Stymied ambition: does a lack of economic freedom lead to migration?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThis contribution investigates the relationship between economic freedom and international migration. We argue that higher levels of economic freedom in the source countries of migration may discourage migration by generating more economic security, providing more economic opportunities and stimulating overall economic activity. Using a panel dataset on migration from 91 developing and emerging to the 20 most attractive OECD destination countries for the 1980-2010 period, we find that more economic freedom at home discourages high-skilled migration but does not matter to low-skilled migration. The negative association between economic freedom and high-skilled emigration also holds when we estimate (dynamic) panel models that allow for endogeneity in the economic freedom-migration nexus. Our findings suggest that high-skilled individuals are especially responsive to the economic incentives arising from economic freedom. This is especially true for those components of economic freedom associated with the provision of economic security in the form of wellprotected property rights, sound money and limited government involvement in the economic life.JEL Classification: F22, J61

Are They Deterred by Welfare? Digging into the Drivers of Highly Skilled Temporary and Long‐term Migrants in Europe

“…Our article is an invitation to revisit the conceptualization of public welfare and taxation as deterrents of HSM. This goes in line with more recent research pointing towards the positive influence of non-economic drivers for HSM, such as distance between origin and destination (Br€ ucker and Defoort, 2009;Belot and Hatton, 2012), social networks (Munshi, 2003;McKenzie and Rapoport, 2010), lifestyle (Khoo, 2014), healthcare (Iredale et al, 2015) as well as richer cultural and social climates (Verwiebe, 2014;Hendriks and Bartram, 2016). Research has also documented that HSM perceive moving to another country per se as a fruitful personal (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014) and professional experience (Sheller and Urry, 2006;Kõu and Bailey, 2014), and that this is decisive in opting for long-term settlement (Chab e-Ferret et al, 2018).…”

“…Other type of returns to education also favour the arrival of HSMs (Belot and Hatton, 2012), such as employment opportunities (Cadena and Kovak, 2016), flexibility in the recognition of educational credentials and economic freedom (Nejad and Young, 2016;Meierrieks and Renner, 2017) and unregulated liberalized labour markets (Doomernik et al, 2009). Finally, recent research has also studied the potential of innovative economies to attract talent when there are stable institutional settings, favorable technical environments (Mihi-Ramirez et al, 2016), open trade and faster growth of information and communication technologies (Michaels et al, 2013).…”

Between Life Cycle Model, Labor Market Integration and Discrimination: An Econometric Analysis of the Determinants of Return Migration

“…Because remittances, intentions to return and efforts in learning the host country's language are components of the same decision function that is simultaneously de-termined, the impact of macroeconomic developments should not be interpreted as a causality. Using natural experiments like an exogenous variation in economic and personal freedom in one home country are barely done in European Migration Economics to my knowledge, whereas the paper of Meierrieks and Renner (2016) show the importance for furture research.…”

Where Do Migrants from Countries Ridden by Environmental Conflict Settle? On the Scale, Selection and Sorting of Conflict-Induced Migration

“…To analyze drivers for the scale of migration, home country characteristics matter, such as (percapita) income but also the quality of institutions, including personal security (e.g., Dreher et al, 2011), level of corruption (Dimant et al, 2013) or (economic) freedom (Meierrieks and Renner, 2017). To assess the scale and the skill composition of migration flows from one country to another, the differences between home and destination matter (e.g., wage differences).…”