Migration: Gains or Losses?*

Abstract

The author examines the question of who gains and who loses from international migration. He attempts to show that "on the basis of generally accepted assumptions, some definite propositions concerning international migration can be rigorously and unambiguously established for the countries of origin and destination as well as for both countries taken together and hence...for the world as a whole." In general economic terms, the author concludes that both sending and receiving countries benefit from such migration.

Bridging Trade Theory and Labour Econometrics: The Effects of International Migration*

“…This redistribution has both intra‐ and inter‐national components. We will consider the intra‐national element momentarily, here we note that a standard result of the general, global welfare analysis is that the country of origin cannot gain from migration and the country of destination cannot lose (Wong, 1986; Tu, 1991; Frydman and Saks, 2007). 28 As Kemp (1993, p. 3) notes: ‘Compensation is always of the initial population, including emigrants but excluding immigrants, and on the basis of country‐of‐origin consumption and prices’ 29 .…”

Gains from Trade versus Gains from Migration: What Makes Them So Different?

“…Accordingly it is not enough, following Grossman (1984), Tu (1991), or Kemp (1993), to treat labor services like any other commodity in an Arrow-Debreu economy. Indeed, to overcome nonexistence problems of the kind investigated by Dasgupta and Ray (1986) and also Coles and Hammond (1991), we follow Mas-Colell (1977) and Yamazaki (1978Yamazaki ( , 1981 in using dispersion assumptions to guarantee that the aggregate demand correspondence has a relatively closed graph, thus ensuring that a Walrasian equilibrium exists.…”

Regional Integration and Labour Mobility

“…Any analysis of overall welfare gains needs to be complemented with awareness of distributional impacts both within sending and receiving countries, and between them. A minority viewpoint is that the country of origin will lose while the country of destination is gaining (Wong, 1986;Tu, 1991;Fydman and Saks, 2007). The implication for North-South migration is that the North will gain and the South will lose from migration.…”