This special issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics (JODE) on “Migration and Development” follows the 15th AFD-World Bank Migration and Development Conference that took place at the NOVA School of Business and Economics, Lisbon, in September 2022. The conference is part of an annual series that started in 2008 and takes place each year at a different location.
The seven articles published in this issue include five papers that were submitted following an open call for papers widely disseminated in the first semester of 2023, and two papers submitted independently that were topically completely within its scope. They all testify to the central role of migration in determining economic, political, and societal change in developing countries and beyond.
The first two papers deal with a question as old as the field of migration and development itself, namely, the question of the brain drain. In “Selecting only the best and brightest? An assessment of migration policy selectivity and its effectiveness,” Rayp, Ruyssen, and Standaert dissect the evolution and increased selectivity of immigration policy, and show how a combination of more stringency and more selectivity effectively shapes the size and composition of migration toward more highly skilled flows. The consequences of this brain drain in terms of winners and losers within one country are analyzed in the case of Senegal in “The Within-Country Distribution of Brain Drain and Brain Gain Effects: A Case Study on Senegal,” by Bocquier et al. The authors make a very important point that while there is a huge “brain drain/gain” literature, the within country effects have been largely neglected. In particular, they show that only the regions with enough international connectivity benefit from brain gain effects, while the remote regions of Senegal remain on the side of the road and suffer from an internal brain drain.
The next two papers are also on a traditional migration and development topic: remittances. However, one paper focuses on monetary remittances and the other on social remittances. In “International Migration, Remittances and Remaining Households: Evidence from a Trade Embargo,” Al-Malk, Maystadt, and Navarro Paniagua revisit the question of how remittances affect the welfare of remaining households. As we know, this question is not easy to answer due to selection into migration and to possible moral hazard effects of remittances. The way the authors address the question is quite original: they take advantage, so to speak, of an unexpected trade embargo imposed on Qatar by its neighbors. The embargo turned out to be a very strong negative shock for the Qatari economy and quite a strong negative income shock for its immigrant workers, and first and foremost for Nepalese immigrant workers, for whom Qatar is a major destination. Obviously, this in turn affected the welfare of remaining households in Nepal, but sometimes in unexpected ways. In “International Migration, Transfers of Norms and Public Goods Back Home,” Brzozowski and Coniglio investigate the channel of social remittances for a type of preferences not explored in previous literature: morality in tax acceptance and tolerance (actually, lack of) to free riding in public goods provision in the context of Polish households with migrants in the West.
Finally, a last set of papers focus on various aspects of refugees’ welfare in their host or transit country. In “Facing Displacement and a Global Pandemic: Evidence from a Fragile State,” Di Maio et al. show that the refugees staying in Libya were disproportionately hit by the Covid pandemic, which deteriorated their health status and exacerbated their economic distress over and beyond what other social groups experienced. The following two papers, which close this special issue, are health economics papers looking at the determinants of the health status of Syrian children refugees in Turkey (in “Child Growth and Refugee Status: Evidence from Syrian Migrants in Turkey,” by Demerci, Foster, and Kirdar) and of native Turkish children exposed to refugee contact, respectively (in “Can refugees improve native children's health? Evidence from Turkey” by Cansu and Maystadt).
