Indeed, they make up the great majority of migration outflows: in 2012, approximately 5%% of foreigners residing in Spain left the country, while less than 1 per thousand of Spaniards born in Spain emigrated.
A negative international migration balance is almost exclusively the result of migration outflows to other countries within Europe.
To answer these questions, we carefully look at the behavior of migration inflows and outflows of different population groups.
Our results hint at a significant change in the scale and composition of migration inflows and outflows.
This is why most of the studies on Spanish emigration had to rely on destination country information.1 It was not until 1998 that an organized attempt was made to keep records of migration inflows and outflows based on municipal registers, which yielded the migration module of the Estadística de Variaciones Residenciales, available since 2002.
According to Adepoju (2007), Ghana was a top ten source of migration of professionals to the UK with an outflow of some 21,500 professionals (1999 2001), especially related to science, such as medical officers, dentists, pharmacists and nursing/midwifery personnel.
This descriptive evidence suggests that even though bilateral inflows and outflows might respond to economic conditions as theory predicts, changes in costs of migration may blur the contemporaneous responses of the stock of migrants to economic conditions somewhat.
Furthermore, regarding whether these increases are the results of migration, the results for population inflow in the third row are significant, while the results for population outflow in the fourth row are insignificant.
The population grew by 0.3%% from 2000 to 2010, due mainly to the difference between births and deaths, in spite of an outflow due to migration (−3.22 per thousand inhabitants during the period or −1.349 per year) (IBGE 2010).
Patterns of migration will certainly change.
