Here and there? Mobile money and the politics of transnational living patterns in West Africa

ABSTRACT

The authors examine the use of mobile money in the context of cross-border remittances in West Africa. Relying on mixed methods and a multi-sited empirical strategy they look at both the sending and receiving conditions of mobile money transfers. By looking at money as socially embedded and the role of migrants in the production of a transnational space, their results highlight that uptake and usage of mobile money for remittances are shaped by a transnational living pattern. At the same time, mobile money also contributes to strengthening and reshaping this pattern. By showing that conversion of virtual money to cash may be performed by brokers that live far away from the end recipient, the paper highlights an important gap between spatial distribution of mobile money infrastructure and the social mediation that supports e-money flows. Cash-based transactions, in turn, are shown to play a key role in the social mediation dynamic.     

郊区农村劳动力乡城迁移意愿研究——以广州市为例

依据农户抽样调查数据,运用逻辑回归模型,对特大城市郊区农村劳动力迁移决策的主要影响因素进行分析。     

The Effect of Regulatory Harmonization on Cross‐Border Labor Migration: Evidence from the Accounting Profession

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross‐border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers, essentially making it easier for accounting professionals to move across countries. Our research design compares the cross‐border migration of accounting professionals relative to tightly matched other professionals before and after regulatory harmonization. We find that international labor migration in the accounting profession increases significantly relative to other professions. We provide evidence that this effect is due to harmonization, rather than increases in the demand for accounting services during the implementation of the rule changes. The findings illustrate that diversity in rules constitutes an economic barrier to cross‐border labor mobility and, more specifically, that accounting harmonization can have a meaningful effect on cross‐border migration.     

Interregional Migration and Thresholds: Evidence from Spain

We analyse the effects of labour market factors on interregional migration in Spain for the period 1988–2010. A basic theoretical framework is developed, suggesting that the effect of labour market variables on migration varies, depending on a certain threshold. The model implications are tested using a new approach based on the presence of endogenous thresholds. We show that Spanish interregional migration can be explained by labour market variables when the labour market conditions at the source region are unfavourable relative to those of the host region. We test the results for several migrant characteristics, such as citizenship, the age range, and return migration.

Migration inter-régionale et seuils - résultats de la recherche en Espagne     

Natural resources and international labour mobility

We study the relationship between natural resource wealth and (skilled and unskilled) emigration. The source data for international migration rates come from Brücker, Capuano, and Marfouk (2013) and measures of resource wealth from the World Bank database. We find that natural resource abundance reduces skilled emigration regardless of countries’ natural wealth, but that natural resources reduce unskilled emigration only in resource-rich countries.     

Revisiting the role of migrant social networks as determinants of international migration flows

This note revisits the role of migrant social networks (MSNs) as determinants of bilateral migration flows. We do so using two alternative databases, covering about 190 world countries for the period 1960–2000. In line with previous estimates, we consistently find a significant, positive, impact of MSNs at destination. We also find that such an impact decreases very slowly as the year when MSNs are observed is farther back in the past. We also find that geographical distance is becoming less and less important over time but significantly explains the absence of a migration corridor only when MSNs at destination have very small sizes.     

Migration,Ethnicity, and the Educational Gradient in the Jakarta Mega-Urban Region: A Spatial Analysis

The Jakarta mega-urban region (MUR) is one of the largest such regions in the world. In this article, we revisit Castles’s seminal 1967 article, based on the 1961 Population Census of Indonesia, on the educational and ethnic composition of Jakarta. Using data from the full-count 2010 Population Census, we examine spatial patterns in the educational gradients of the population across the Jakarta MUR and look to determine whether these patterns can be explained by internal migration and ethnic composition at the kecamatan (subdistrict) level. We find that population movement from the core to the outer areas has softened the historically extremely sharp gradation in educational attainment across the MUR. We show the dominance of the Sundanese and Bantenese ethnic groups in the rural hinterlands of the MUR, where the average educational attainment is relatively low, and note this question of rurality versus ethnicity when interpreting our results.