Overcoming data limitations to obtain migration flows for ASEAN countries

This paper seeks to provide a better understanding of international migration among the ten countries constituting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In reviewing the data, we identify several major issues concerning the availability of data, consistency in definitions of migration, and a general absence of many of the important migration categories needed to understand the movements. We propose an adaptation of the multiplicative component model framework to first estimate total immigration and total emigration for each ASEAN country from 2000 to 2015, borrowing information from 34 other countries in the world. Second, bilateral flows are estimated using a range of auxiliary information on the interactions among ASEAN countries and constraining them to the total immigration and total emigration estimates. The result is a complete and consistent account of migration flows that allows one to examine how migration has coincided with rapid demographic and economic change in the region.This research is funded by the Australian Research Council as part of the Discovery Project on ‘overcoming the problems of inconsistent migration data in the Asia Pacific’ (DP170102468)