Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration

The document examines how 'migration' and 'development' are defined and measured in quantitative research, highlighting a gap in evidence regarding migration aspirations, failed attempts, and involuntary immobility. It discusses the challenges of establishing causal links due to endogeneity—specifically reverse causality, self-selection, and omitted variables—and evaluates experimental and non-experimental methods to address these biases. The paper advocates for a holistic, multi-dimensional approach to development that moves beyond economic metrics to include social, institutional, and environmental outcomes.

• There is a significant lack of empirical research and data on the development impacts of migration aspirations, failed migration attempts, and involuntary immobility, which represents a gap in the current migration-development nexus literature.
• Involuntary immobility can lead to 'aspiration traps,' where individuals adjust their life expectations downward to avoid unhappiness, potentially hindering long-term investments in education or economic change at the individual, household, and community levels.
• Quantitative empirical literature on migration is heavily biased toward economic and social development outcomes (such as education and health), while institutional and environmental impacts are rarely analyzed.
• Establishing causal impacts of migration on development is complicated by endogeneity, which manifests as reverse causality (where development drives migration), self-selection (migrants differ systematically from non-migrants), and omitted variable bias.
• Experimental methods, including natural experiments (e.g., economic shocks or policy changes) and true randomized field experiments, are effective for addressing self-selection issues, though they may suffer from limited geographical scope or weak external validity.
• Non-experimental methods to address endogeneity include instrumental variables, selection-correction models, and propensity score matching, though finding valid instruments is difficult and matching only addresses observable characteristics.
• The 'triple selectivity problem' occurs when research analyzes return migration, as it involves three layers of selection: who emigrates, who returns, and who engages in labor market activities upon return.
• Remittance data from Balance of Payment (BOP) statistics is often approximately 75% higher than data from household surveys, suggesting significant underreporting in surveys due to recall bias or intentional misreporting.
• To improve future research, the authors recommend oversampling migrant groups because random sampling often fails to produce a sufficient sample size, as many countries have international emigration rates below 2% of the population.

APA

Andersson, L., & Siegel, M. (2019). Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration. Peace Research Institute Oslo. https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/517b4dbe-bb07-4948-8682-06274e5ef9d4/Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration.pdf?inline=true

Chicago

Andersson, Lisa, and Melissa Siegel. Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration. Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2019. https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/517b4dbe-bb07-4948-8682-06274e5ef9d4/Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration.pdf?inline=true.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Andersson |first1=Lisa |last2=Siegel |first2=Melissa |title=Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration |publisher=Peace Research Institute Oslo |date=September 2019 |url=https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/517b4dbe-bb07-4948-8682-06274e5ef9d4/Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration.pdf?inline=true |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{andersson2019empirical, author = {Andersson, Lisa and Siegel, Melissa}, title = {{Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration}}, institution = {Peace Research Institute Oslo}, year = {2019}, month = sep, url = {https://cdn.cloud.prio.org/files/517b4dbe-bb07-4948-8682-06274e5ef9d4/Empirical assessments of the development impacts of migration.pdf?inline=true}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }