Estimating and forecasting bilateral migration flows from Europe to South America, 1986-2060

Aparicio-Castro, A. (2021). Estimating and forecasting bilateral migration flows from Europe to South America, 1986-2060. IIASA YSSP Report. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA

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Abstract

Europe has been one of the main destinations for migrants since 1990, hosting more than 30% of the global migrant stocks. Given the increasing importance of Europe as a destination, research usually focuses on migration towards the region. Less attention has been paid to migration from Europe to the rest of the world, neglecting the need of analysing the impact of emigration. Emigration is a widely debatable topic amongst policymakers insofar as it may represent the loss/waste of human
capital. South America (SA) has been one of the usual receiving regions of high-skilled migrants arriving from Europe, even producing the change of the direction of Europe-SA flows in some periods, e.g., of economic crisis. The absence of a complete-time series of these flows entangles drawing conclusions about them. Therefore, we aim at (a) estimating a complete and consistent time series of bilateral migration flows from Europe to SA from 1986 to 2019, and (b) quantifying how likely these patterns will remain across time, forecasting these flows until 2060. We use census data as an input to estimate flows since they are the most complete and reliable data. However, using censuses entails (a) working with five-year transition data that are not always comparable as they do not always refer to the same five years, (b) measurement errors caused by measuring migration indirectly, and (c) missingness in the intercensal periods, for which data are not available. We propose a two-part hierarchical Bayesian model, which (a) translates five-year transition census
data into one-year values; (b) corrects the measurement errors that using census data involves; (c) imputes flows for the intercensal periods; and, (d) forecasts these flows until 2060. The output is a set of synthetic estimates of bilateral migration flows from Europe to SA from 1986 to 2060 with measures of uncertainty.

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