Labor Market Impacts
Recent Activity
The Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) and Europe appear to be an ideal demographic match: the former has a large supply of young, active workers, and the latter has a shortage of the youthful, skilled or unskilled labor it needs to sustain its economic competitiveness. MENA is the source of 20 million first-generation migrants, half of them now living in another MENA country and most of the rest in Europe. The region also hosts around the same number within its borders. In addition, the size of MENA’s working-age population will continue to rise sharply in the next two decades while the corresponding segment of the population in Europe will soon start to decline.
This brief offers an analysis of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, the Philippines’ highly successful system of managing the overseas employment of temporary Filipino workers. The report examines the structure and mechanism of the system, identifies key areas of improvement, and offers policy recommendations for addressing existing flaws.
Migrants' networks and relatively small travel distances help explain migration from one developing country to another. Dilip Ratha and William Shaw of the World Bank look at these and other reasons for and effects of South-South migration.
In the 1990s, Mexican immigrants began to leave California, Texas, and Illinois for the so-called new settlement states where they had not previously resided. As Ivan Light of UCLA explains, their reasons for leaving or bypassing Los Angeles were both economic and political.
This report examines the ways in which governments can make the emerging global mobility system work better for European migrant-receiving countries, their developing-country partners, and the migrants themselves.
This report seeks to untangle the economic consequences of immigration from the intricate web of influences that affect the labor market by examining the role of various non-immigration factors in determining labor supply and demand.
The addition of Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union means another round of anxieties about labor migrants. Catherine Drew and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public Policy Research in London explain how this enlargement is different from the historic one in 2004 and why most EU Member States favor temporary restriction.