Socioeconomic Driving Forces of International Migration

Abstract

Abstract This paper makes a contribution to the literature on the driving forces of international migration. In contrast to the existing literature we consider the effect of socioeconomic variables (population dynamics, education and health, and openness) on migration flows. Especially the effects of openness of a society have not received much attention in the scientific debate.We use a panel data set of bilateral migration flows between 16 destination and 198 origin countries over the time span from 1980 to 2015. Most importantly, we find that our socioeconomic variables significantly affect the migration decision. Including socioeconomic variables does affect the size of the effects of the commonly used variables in the literature.Further, we find robust evidence that the socioeconomic variables at hand have non-linear effects on migration. For example, we find that the effect of human capital on migration follows an inverted U-shaped pattern.