Bilateral International Migrant Stocks: An Inquiry of Measurement Discrepancies (1960-2020)

Cris Beauchemin , INED
Arnaud Bringé, Ined
Bruno Schoumaker, UCLouvain

At the turn of the millennium that several international organizations (the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) published new bilateral migration databases that made it possible to measure not only international immigrant stocks in all destination countries of the world, but also emigrants stocks of all origin countries. Accessible in open access, these databases became major sources of academic and institutional publications. They are used extensively for descriptive purposes at the global and national levels, for estimating international migration flows, or for studies on the determinants and consequences of migration. All these databases are based on the same principle: using mainly census data, they are migration matrices that cross all origin and destination countries in the world. They should therefore show similar measures of international migrant stocks. However, we discovered that estimates of bilateral stocks (ie. number of migrants from country A living in country B) are quite frequently radically different from a source to another. In this paper, our objectives are following: (1) to map the dozen existing databases, examining their conceptual and technical underpinnings, (2) to compare the bilateral migrant stocks provided by the diverse databases in order to systematically identify outliers, (3) to model the factors that explain them, and (4) to assess the impact of inconsistent estimates on the measurement of international migration across the world.

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 Presented in Session 66. International Migration