The impact of the movement of labour: results from a model of bilateral migration flows

The economics literature increasingly recognizes the importance of migration. In this paper, a bilateral global migration model is developed to investigate the impact of lifting restrictions on the movement of labour. Quotas on skilled and unskilled labour in the developed economies are increased by 3% of their labour forces, with the additional labour supplied by developing economies.This paper improves upon the previous work of Walmsley and Winters (2005). A critical weakness of the previous work was that it was unable to capture the impacts of specific bilateral migration flows or liberalizations between countries. This paper uses a bilateral global migration model that exploits migration data obtained from Parsons, Skeldon, Winters, and Walmsley (2007) that allow the model to account for bilateral migration flows.The results confirm that restrictions on migration impose significant costs on nearly all countries, with the modest liberalization increasing global GDP by US$ 288 billion. All of the developed (labour importing) economies gain in terms of real incomes. While results differ across the developing (labour exporting) economies, most gain as a result of the higher remittances sent home.