The migration literature has traditionally used gravity models to account for the determinants of migration flows (see, for example, the recent work by Felbermayr and Toubal 2012; or Hanson and McIntosh 2012).
Even the enlargements of the EU towards Southern Europe Greecee in 1981 as well as Spain and Portugal in 1986) did not induce any remarkable changes in observed migration flows (see, e.g., Bover and Pilar Velilla 2001).
"Nauru is well-placed to provide surge capacity for large-scale migration flows, as we saw last year in the Andaman Sea," he said, referring to the Rohingya refugee crisis which saw thousands of asylum seekers left adrift after multiple countries refused to allow their boats to dock.
The EU-Turkey deal, coupled with the closure of a humanitarian corridor through the Balkans, has seen migration flows to eastern Europe fall drastically since March.
Our dependent variable is the net migration flows from all over the world (see "Appendix A") into OECD countries (plus Russia) using data from the OECD migration database during the period 1995 2011.
As the Asian region and the developing world saw the rise of labor migration flows since the 1980s, various countries have foreseen the need to establish international and regional agreements to outline the rights of migrant workers.
Amongst OECD countries, this is mirrored in the incidence and extent of migration flows between Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States; between Austria, Germany and Switzerland; between Belgium and France; and between Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden (see Table 1).
DEMIG C2C database covers bilateral migration flows for 34 reporting countries from and to a broad range of origin countries over the 1946 2011 period (see Vezzoli, Villares-Varela, & De Haas, 2014).
It was expected that migration flows within Europe would even out over time, with much short-term migration and long-term migration in the low thousands.
However, without more specific information about internal migration flows, we cannot assess this risk.
