Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of democracy on migration using a dynamic panel model. Our model controls for the network effects of migration and country fixed effects. We construct a binary measure of democracy indicating a precise transition of political regimes and reducing measurement error. The baseline results show that democracy can increase migration by 29% in the long-run. Using the waves of democratizations and reversals as instruments for democracy, we find comparable estimates. Our findings suggest that democracy can increase migration by permitting dual citizenship, allowing sending remittances, providing better health, improving human development and human capital.
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Notes
- 1.
Migration in this paper indicates in-migration, but not out-migration or return migration.
- 2.
Freedom House define a political regime by assigning three scores: Free, partial free and no free. Generally, empirical papers construct dichotomous variable by putting 1 for democracy if it satisfies either free or partial free and otherwise 0. For example, Freedom House assigns “no free” in 1991 for Kuwait indicating non-democratic. However, in 1992 score from Freedom House is “partial free” for Kuwait which suggests that political regime is democratic, but it remains authoritarian. Thus, while measuring democracy by dichotomous variable using Freedom House index, it involves measurement error. On the other hand, from 1991 to 1992, polity 2 score rises from −9 to −7 for Kuwait which does not provide precise information of transition of political regimes.
- 3.
Countries may vary from geographical or colonial or historical perspectives. So, countries with unobservable factors may affect our estimates.
- 4.
Political right comprises of four sub-categories: electoral process, political pluralism, participation and functioning of government. Civil right constitutes of freedom of expression and belief, association and organization rights, rule of law, personal autonomy and individual rights. For details, see Freedom House (2017).
- 5.
Polity2 variable relies on some criteria like executive power, executive selections and the freedom of elections. For details, see Munck (2002).
- 6.
- 7.
Past migration in host countries plays an important role to encourage migrants from their countries of origin as they signal host countries' migration policy, job market condition, social, economic and political advantages, culture and people, integration to mainstream society, racial impatience and other factors to family members, relatives, friends and communities.
- 8.
Asymptotic Nickell bias results from the lack of strict exogeneity of the DFE model.
- 9.
Democratic revolution in the MENA region began in Tunisia which spreads to Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Bahrain, Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Because of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arab, Algeria, Kuwait and Jordon took steps to provide political and economic freedom to their people. In contrast, Arab Spring resulted in conflicts and civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Lybia and Yemen (Abbasi 2012).
- 10.
In Fisher-type unit root test, H0: All panels contain unit root; H1: At least one panel is stationary.
- 11.
The maximum lags we considered in our analysis is 4. To select preferred lags, we set the null and alternative hypotheses; H0: \( \delta_{l} \) = 0. H1: \( \delta_{l} \) ≠ 0. Using the t-statistics, we find that 2 is our preferred lag in our model.
- 12.
In overidentification test, H0: All instruments are exogenous; H1: At least one instrument is endogenous.
- 13.
GDP is the aggregate value of goods and services that are provided by all domestic producers of a country. GDP per capita is GDP divided by population and is expressed in 2010 US dollars. Employment is expressed as a ratio of employed to total working-age population in a country. Both of them are taken from the World Development Indicators.
- 14.
New classical or Harris-Todaro model explains how economic development affects migration. They build a two-sector model where they show that people move from rural to urban region to have higher or expected higher incomes. See Harris and Todaro (1970), for detail.
- 15.
Political stability and rule of law data are taken from the Worldwide Governance Indicators. The former variable is constructed to explain the perceptions of likelihood that a government can be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutionally or domestic violence and terrorism. The rule of law variable measures the extent to which people can have confidence in and abide by the rules of society. These include perceptions of incidence of crime, the effectiveness and predictability of the judiciary and enforceability of contracts. Both political stability and rule of law are constructed by performance of governance which ranges approximately from −2.5 to 2.5 indicating weak to strong performances.
- 16.
- 17.
Human development index (HDI), a measure of human development, is the geometric mean of three normalized indices of health, education and income and is taken from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human capital index (HCI), based on years of schooling constructed by (Barro 2013), is taken from Penn World Table. This index indicates average schooling years in the total population over the age of 25.
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Azad, K., Atallah, G. (2019). Migration and Democracy. In: Bagnara, S., Tartaglia, R., Albolino, S., Alexander, T., Fujita, Y. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 825. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96068-5_70
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