More Migration Trends

I’ve decided to produce some more charts to demonstrate a number of relationships between economic activity and Irish migration patterns.

The first chart is an extension of the figure produced in my previous post. I have extended the data series back to 1958. A similar relationship exists. Figure two does not show a relationship between contemporaneous GDP growth and net migration. However, the key word here is contemporaneous, because this figure fails to take account of lags in Real GDP growth, an important issue no doubt. As I said in the comments, you would be able to net out these effects with appropriate time-series econometrics, something I hope to do soon.

The third figure shows the long-run relationship between the Irish-UK GDP per capita difference. I choose the UK because it has been the primary destination country for Irish migrants in the 20th century. It will be interesting to see how this relationship holds in the near future. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Australia, New Zealand and Canada are now the major destinations for Irish migration. A scatter plot of real GDP growth rate differences and net migration yields a similar result to the second figure. Again, I would highlight the difficulty in drawing inference from this comparison.

The last figure demonstrates the long-run relationship between net migration and unemployment. It is interesting to note that 2009’s position in this figure is not an outlier. This would suggest that labor market conditions may provide the clearest pathway through which we can examine the effects of economic trends on demography. However, with issues such as lags, reverse-causality, this issue is very much open to debate.