Global Labour Mobility

One of the consequences of globalisation has been a shift in the global demand for labour. In recent years, many richer economies have suffered declining rates of fertility and shifts in types of industry, creating new work opportunities. At the same time, development and democratisation in poorer economies have created a labour force more eager, and able, to migrate to take advantage of these opportunities. The result has been a significant expansion of global mobility.

Governments in both origin and destination economies are devising policies, independently, bilaterally and multilaterally, that respond to this shifting global demand for labour. However, fears about the practical and political consequences of permanent settlement of migrants have led to renewed interest in temporary, rather than permanent mobility. The introduction of the H-1B visas in the United States and ‘green cards’ in Germany are recent examples of destination countries opening the door to increasing numbers of skilled non-permanent immigrants. Several origin countries in Asia, including India and the Philippines, also actively seek labour markets for their workers overseas. At the multilateral level, the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) makes provision under its ‘Mode 4’ for member countries to commit themselves to certain defined limits for the temporary inward mobility of service sector workers, although bilateral temporary labour schemes are a more common way in which such mobility is facilitated.

The Centre is at the forefront of trying to understand both the nature of specific temporary worker schemes, and what a liberalisation in temporary mobility would imply for global welfare. So far, this has included analysis of bilateral labour schemes in the Mediterranean, and of options for the UK under its new ‘managed migration’ policy. We have also assembled a new ‘Global Migrant Origin Database’ – a 226x226 matrix of countries of birth and current residence based on analysis of national census and UN data. The full database will be published in 2006, but in the meantime, data has already been used by the World Bank to estimate that an increase of 3% in the work force in high-income countries through migration by 2025 could increase global real income by 0.6 percent, or $356 billion. A separate analysis has also been conducted by Centre researchers for the Asia-Pacific region, whilst the database has been used to compare the relationship between migration and trade in Europe and Central Asia.