Toward Building a Comprehensive Migration Projections Framework

This paper discusses selected challenges involved in migration forecasting. It begins with a discussion of how to capture uncertainty in future migration, then goes on to define a dynamic analytical framework which attempts to cover the most important causal mechanisms described by recent theories of international migration. This is done by capturing different drivers separately for sending areas and destination areas, including environmental and demographic factors, factors related to human capital development, labor market factors, and other quality of life related factors. These two sets of drivers, together with the given history of migration streams and the resulting social networks, determine the individual decision to migration. In combination with the impact of relevant government policies (mostly in the areas of destination), the individual decision can then be transformed into an actual move. The paper concludes with some more general consideration of how to forecast the population by some of the characteristics (such as level of educational attainment) that are expected both to drive conditions in sending and destination areas as well as in part to determine the shape of national migration policies