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This paper contributes to a small but rapidly growing literature concerned with the potentially substantial implications of international migration for economic development in LDCs. We study the linkages between overseas employment, savings and entrepreneurial activity on return. In an econometric model of the probability of entrepreneurial activity, we find evidence supporting the hypotheses that both overseas savings, and the duration of stay overseas increase the probability of becoming an entrepreneur amongst literate returnees to Egypt. Amongst illiterate returnees, overseas savings alone increase the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The results for literates suggest that skill acquisition overseas may matter more substantially than overcoming a savings constraint in explaining how overseas opportunities influence entrepreneurship on return.For illiterates, who usually accept menial positions overseas that offer little opportunity for learning, the opposite obtains. I INTRODUCTIONThe gradual integration of fragmented national labour markets into world markets provides unprecedented scope for workers to be employed-perhaps only temporarily-outside their country of citizenship, in order to acquire new skills and ideas, and to accumulate savings at a faster rate than is possible in a low-income country. The "brain-drain" to high wage countries already provides the basis of widely discussed proposals to compensate LDCs for the loss of human capital using income taxation of migrant earnings -for example, Bhagwati (1976). Our focus in this paper concerns another mechanism whereby the "brain-drain", and in particular its temporary nature, might contribute to economic development. We explore how overseas work experience in high wage countries enables return migrants to bring accumulated savings, new skills and ideas that might facilitate 'modernisation' and economic growth in the origin country. In particular we examine two theories of how overseas employment might enable return migrants to provide an entrepreneurial contribution: first, accumulated savings overcome domestic liquidity constraints, and secondly, that overseas work experience generates new skills and ideas.The possibility that return migrants from overseas bring additional experience and savings that might help to transform LDCs first received serious attention from sociologists concerned to understand rural social change. For example, Foster (1967) There are only a few theoretical models of how international migration may influence welfare in the origin country which incorporate more than a 'lost worker' effect -that is the consequences of the decline in the domestic labour stock. It had been thought that the effect of the 'lost worker' on domestic welfare hinges solely on the presence of distortions in the domestic labour market -for example Bhagwati and Hamada (1974). However recent analysis due to RiveraBatiz (1982), has shown that in models with non-traded goods in the origin economy, the welfare of those remaining in the orig...

We first develop a theoretical model in which individuals are embedded within a network of social relationships. We show that, conditional on being employed, the probability to find a job through social networks, relative to other search methods, increases and is concave with the size of the network. The effects are stronger for the uneducated. There is however a critical size of the network above which this probability decreases. We then test empirically these theoretical findings for Egypt using the 1998 Labor Market Survey. The empirical evidence supports the predictions of our theoretical model. D

Starting in 2011, the Syrian conflict caused a large influx of refugees into Jordan. In 2015, there were an estimated 1.3 million Syrians in a country with just 6.6 million Jordanians. This paper investigates the impact of the Syrian refugee influx on the Jordanian labor market. Panel data from 2010 and 2016 combined with information on where the refugee influx was concentrated allow us to identify the impact of refugees on Jordanians' labor market outcomes. Overall, we find that Jordanians living in areas with a high concentration of refugees have had no worse labor market outcomes than Jordanians with less exposure to the refugee influx.

The evidence on the impact of return migration on the sending country is rather sparse, though growing. The contribution of this paper is in addressing various selectivity problems whilst quantifying the impact of return migration on wages of returnees using non-experimental data.Using Egyptian household level survey data, I estimate the wages of return migrants controlling for several selectivity biases arising from emigration choice, return migration choice, labor force participation choice and occupational choice following return. The findings provide strong evidence that overseas temporary migration results in a wage premium upon return, even after controlling for the various potential selection biases. However the estimates underscore the significance of controlling for both emigration and return migration selections. Ignoring the double selectivity in migration would overestimate the impact of return migration on the wage premium of returnees, as migrants are positively selected relative to non-migrants, but returnees are negatively selected amongst migrants.