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We study the impact of international migration on enrollment of the left-behinds in Albania using the 2008 and 2012 Living Standard Measurement Survey. We employ a two-stage Probit model controlling for endogeneity with an instrumental-variable approach. We find that migration has a negative and significant impact on enrollment in both waves. This result holds across different sub-samples and alternative ways to proxy within-household migration. Our findings confirm similar results for 2005 and cast doubts on the effectiveness of recent educational reforms and migration-oriented policies in Albania. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the relationships between international human migration and merchandise trade, using a complex-network approach. We firstly compare the topological structure of worldwide networks of human migration and bilateral trade over the period 1960–2000. Next, we ask whether the position of any pair of countries in the migration network affects their bilateral trade flows. We show that: (i) both weighted and binary versions of the networks of international migration and trade are strongly correlated; (ii) such correlations can be mostly explained by country economic/demographic size and geographical distance; and (iii) pairs of countries that are more central in the international-migration network trade more. Our findings suggest that bilateral trade between any two countries is not only affected by the presence of migrants from either countries but also by their relative embeddedness in the complex web of corridors making up the network of international human migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies international migration from a complex-network perspective. We define the international migration network (IMN) as the weighted-directed graph where nodes are world countries and links account for the stock of migrants originated in a given country and living in another country at a given point in time. We characterize the binary and weighted architecture of the network and its evolution over time in the period 1960-2000. We find that the IMN is organized around a modular structure with a small-world binary pattern displaying disassortativity and high clustering, with power-law distributed weighted-network statistics. We also show that a parsimonious gravity model of migration can account for most of observed IMN topological structure. Overall, our results suggest that socioeconomic, geographical, and political factors are more important than local-network properties in shaping the structure of the IMN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]