A Gravity Model Analysis of International Migration from Sri Lanka to South-East Asian and European Countries

Abstract

Since the 1970s, the Middle East region has dominated the foreign employment market of Sri Lanka. However, Sri Lankan migrants have been paying more attention on moving to South-East Asian and European countries as noted in recent decades. In Sri Lanka, there is a substantial lacuna on the macroeconomic studies related to migration although international migration has a significant impact on economic indicators. As a contribution to reduce this gap, this study examines the macroeconomic determinants of international labor migration from Sri Lanka to South-east Asian and European countries using the gravity model of migration. As, in presence of heteroscedasticity, linear estimators result in inconsistency in estimated coefficients unless we use robust standard errors, Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimation technique was used to find the determinants using panel data over the period of 2007 to 2015. Destination-year fixed effects were used to capture unobserved time-variant and time-invariant variables as well as to account for the multilateral resistance. Results reveal that GDP per capita and unemployment rate of Sri Lanka are the push factors which force people to move from Sri Lanka while the destination countries' population and dependency ratio are the pull factors which attract migrants towards the destination. Moreover, the population of Sri Lanka and poverty headcount ratio were also found as significant determinants of international migration.

A gravity model analysis of international migration from BRIC to OECD countries using Poisson Pseudo-maximum likelihood Approach

“…The significant push factors listed in Table 7 , the negative significant relationship reported for destination population saying that BRIC migration mostly flew to areas with less population as that area demands people or labor force, the relationship is significant at 1%. Dharmadasa and Herath (2020) work on the international migration of Sri Lanka towards the southeast Asian and European countries. The significant pull factor is population and push factors are unemployment and GDP per capita, are same as ours.…”

“…The results indicate to accept the first proposition of study and H 1 , H 2 , H 3 and H 4 which states that there is significant association is present between gravity variables of source and destination. Gravity model is widely used to study migration determinants ( Kim and Cohen, 2010 ; Dharmadasa and Herath 2020 ; Ferwerda and Gest 2020 ). The results indicate that as the population of the source countries grow the international migration will grow too from BRIC.…”

From South Asia to Southern Europe: a comparative analysis of Sri Lankans’ residential segregation in the main Italian cities using high-resolution data on regular lattice geographies

“…The existing literature dealing with Sri Lankans settled in Europe is still limited and includes both group-specific analyses (Aspinall, 2019;Dharmadasa & Herath, 2020) and comparisons between Sri Lankans and other foreign communities (Benassi et al, 2019;Maloutas & Arapoglou, 2016). Even fewer contributions analyse the settlement geographies of Sri Lankans in Italy, one of their main European destination countries together with the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland (Dharmadasa & Herath, 2020). This is quite surprising, because this community shows a peculiar residential distribution across Italy (Benassi et al, 2022(Benassi et al, , 2023a.…”