Natural resources and international labour mobility

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural resources
• international migration
• finite mixture models

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C40
• J24
• O15
• Q30

Acknowledgement

I thank an anonymous referee for very valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 SWIID version 3.1 (released December 2011). Available at http://siuc.edu/fsolt/swiid/swiid.html

2 We do not include the absolute level of poverty in our regressions because of a lack of available data; an important percentage of observations is missing when poverty is included (our sample reduces to a panel data of 54 countries).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONICYT FONDECYT-INICIACION [grant number 11121155].