Number of results to display per page
Search Results
12. Beyond Aid: Migration as a Tool for Disaster Recovery
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Kaci Farrell
- Publication Date:
- 06-2011
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes can devastate people's lives and a country's economy, particularly in the developing world. More than 200,000 people perished when a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, and Americans responded with an outpouring of private and public assistance. Those relief efforts, as they nearly always do, focused primarily on delivering aid. The United States barely used another tool for disaster relief: migration policy. This policy brief explores the various legal channels through which the U.S. government could, after future overseas disasters, leverage the power of migration to help limited numbers of people. We describe what could have been done for Haiti, but the lessons apply to future scenarios.
- Topic:
- Humanitarian Aid, Migration, Natural Disasters, and Foreign Aid
- Political Geography:
- United States
13. Economics and Emigration: Trillion-dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?
- Author:
- Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 08-2011
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Large numbers of people born in poor countries would like to leave those countries, but barriers prevent their emigration. Those barriers, according to economists' best estimates to date, cost the world economy much more than all remaining barriers to the international movement of goods and capital combined. Yet economists spend much more time studying the movement of goods and capital, and when they study migration at all, they focus on the effects of immigration on nonmigrants in destination countries. I ask why this is the case and sketch a four-point research agenda on the effects of emigration. Barriers to emigration deserve a research priority that is commensurate with their likely colossal economic effects.
- Topic:
- Economics, Migration, Poverty, and Immigration
14. Migration as a Tool for Disaster Recovery: U.S. Policy Options in the Case of Haiti
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Tejaswi Velayudhan
- Publication Date:
- 10-2011
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The United States should take modest steps to create a legal channel for limited numbers of people fleeing natural disasters overseas to enter the United States. This would address two related problems: the lack of any systematic U.S. policy to help the growing numbers of people displaced across borders by natural disasters and the inability of U.S. humanitarian relief efforts to reduce systemic poverty or sustainably improve victims' livelihoods. The aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake presents a compelling case study of the administrative and legislative ways the U.S. government could address both problems. Migration is already a proven and powerful force for reducing Haitians' poverty. A few modest changes in the U.S. approach could greatly aid Haiti's recovery.
- Topic:
- Humanitarian Aid, Migration, and Developing World
- Political Geography:
- United States, Caribbean, and Haiti
15. A Labor Mobility Agenda for Development
- Author:
- Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 01-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Rich countries have made efforts for half a century to help people in poor countries catch up to rich-country standards of living. Those efforts have included giving foreign aid, encouraging overseas investment, dismantling trade barriers, and spreading ideas and institutions. That is, their international development policy has been to encourage the globalization of almost all factors of production—except labor. So far, this policy has failed to cause the living standards of most people in most developing countries to converge with living standards in rich countries. But the globalization of labor—greater mobility for workers across borders—quickly and massively raises migrants' living standards toward those of rich countries. This paper argues that every rich country should consider its immigration policy to be part of its international development policy, and vice versa. A development policy that includes migration will be more effective; an immigration policy that includes development will better serve rich countries' ideals and interests. The paper also gives a non-technical review of new research on several common objections to unifying development policy and migration policy. One concrete way forward is for rich countries to greatly open up legal pathways for temporary labor movement.
- Topic:
- Globalization, Foreign Aid, and Labor Issues
16. When Does Rigorous Impact Evaluation Make a Difference? The Case of the Millennium Villages
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes
- Publication Date:
- 10-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? We study one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained local economic development in rural Africa. We illustrate the benefits of rigorous impact evaluation in this setting by showing that estimates of the project's effects depend heavily on the evaluation method. Comparing trends at the MVP intervention sites in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria to trends in the surrounding areas yields much more modest estimates of the project's effects than the before-versus-after comparisons published thus far by the MVP. Neither approach constitutes a rigorous impact evaluation of the MVP, which is impossible to perform due to weaknesses in the evaluation design of the project's initial phase. These weaknesses include the subjective choice of intervention sites, the subjective choice of comparison sites, the lack of baseline data on comparison sites, the small sample size, and the short time horizon. We describe how the next wave of the intervention could be designed to allow proper evaluation of the MVP's impact at little additional cost.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, and Foreign Aid
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Nigeria
17. The Roots of Global Wage Gaps: Evidence from Randomized Processing of U.S. Visas
- Author:
- Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 06-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers' wages and productivity. Large differences in wages across countries could arise from several sources. These include barriers to trade in outputs, differences in technology, differences in workers, or differences in the other factors of production accessible in different countries. To measure the relative importance of these sources in one setting, this study exploits the randomized processing of U.S. visas for a group of Indian workers who produce software within a single multinational firm. In this setting, international barriers to trade in outputs, barriers to technology transfer, and all observable or unobservable differences between workers are extremely low. The results indicate that location outside of India causes a sixfold increase in the wages of the same worker using the same technology to produce a highly tradable good. Under plausible assumptions about competition in the industry, this suggests that country-of-work by itself is responsible—in this industry—for roughly three-quarters of the gap in productivity between workers in India and workers in the richest countries. These findings have implications for open questions in labor, growth, international, and development economics.
- Topic:
- Economics and Labor Issues
- Political Geography:
- United States and India
18. Blunt Instruments: On Establishing the Causes of Economic Growth
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Samuel Bazzi
- Publication Date:
- 05-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Despite intense concern that many instrumental variables used in growth regressions may be weak, invalid, or both, top journals continue to publish studies of economic growth based on problematic instruments. Doing so risks pushing the entire literature closer to irrelevance. We illustrate hidden problems with identification in recent prominently published and widely cited growth studies using their original data. We urge researchers to take three steps to overcome the shortcomings: grounding research in somewhat more generalized theoretical models, deploying the latest methods to test sensitivity to violations of the exclusion restriction, and opening the “black box” of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) with supportive evidence of instrument strength.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, and Political Economy
19. Skill Flow: A Fundamental Reconsideration of Skilled-Worker Mobility and Development
- Author:
- Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 08-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Large numbers of doctors, engineers, and other skilled workers from developing countries choose to move to other countries. Do their choices threaten development? The answer appears so obvious that their movement is most commonly known by the pejorative term “brain drain.” This paper reconsiders the question, starting from the most mainstream, explicit definitions of “development.” Under these definitions, it is only possible to advance development by regulating skilled workers' choices if that regulation greatly expands the substantive freedoms of others to meet their basic needs and live the lives they wish. Much existing evidence and some new evidence suggests that regulating skilled-worker mobility itself does little to address the underlying causes of skilled migrants' choices, generally brings few benefits to others, and often brings diverse unintended harm. The paper concludes with examples of effective ways that developing countries can build a skill base for development without regulating human movement. The mental shift required to take these policies seriously would be aided by dropping the sententious term “brain drain” in favor of the neutral, accurate, and concise term “skill flow.”
- Topic:
- Development, Migration, Labor Issues, and Brain Drain
20. Income Per Natural: Measuring Development for People rather than Places - Working Paper 143
- Author:
- Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett
- Publication Date:
- 03-2008
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. We create a first estimate a new statistic: income per natural—the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare. The estimates differ substantially from traditional measures of GDP or GNI per resident, and not just for a handful of tiny countries. Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50% higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10%. We also show that poverty estimates are very different for national residents and naturals; for example, 26 percent of Haitian naturals who are not poor by the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. These estimates are simply descriptive statistics and do not depend on any assumptions about how much of observed income differences across naturals is selection and how much is a pure location effect. Our conservative, if rough, estimate is that three quarters of this difference represents the effect of international migration on income per natural. This means that departing one's country of birth is today one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.
- Topic:
- Demographics, Development, Economics, Migration, Poverty, and Population
- Political Geography:
- United States and Albania
- « Previous
- Next »
- 1
- 2
- 3