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This report of the BRIDGES project investigates as to how locally dominant and EU-promoted narratives related to migration, interact and influence the decision-making of potential migrants in the Gambia. The study is based on focus groups and in-depth interviews with 60 Gambian youngsters who think about migrating abroad. The report starts by outlining the dominant - or Master - narratives on migration and Europe in the Gambia. These narratives put to the forefront the opportunities for a positive life change enabled by a person migrating to Europe. Europe is associated with (professional or educational) opportunities and a probability of getting high(er) living standards and achieving social mobility. Practically every participant tended to see a positive cost-benefit calculus in favour of migration, yet some considered the risks to outweigh the benefits of irregular migration. The research shows that the messages promoted in EU-funded information campaigns struggle to unfold an influence in view of the dominant Master narratives on migration and Europe. Aggregately speaking, potential migrants in the Gambia rely little on the information of EU-funded campaigns when making decisions. The exception are potential migrants who are already sensitive about the risks of the journey. The campaigns are able to reinforce existing doubts, thereby tipping the overall calculus in some cases. That said, information is only one factor among others influencing migratory decision-making. More relevant ones are the actual livelihood opportunities or a lack of prospects in the Gambia as well as the social prestige that can be gained through migration.

The authors investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration to those moving to other destinations. The authors also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, those present in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority ‘penalty’ on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.

China has used two main spatial policies to shape its geographic patterns of development: restricted labor mobility through the Hukou residential registration system and massive infrastructure investment, notably a 96,000 kilometer national expressway network. This paper develops a structural new economic geography model to examine the impacts of these policies. Fitting the model to available data allows simulating counterfactual scenarios comparing each policy’s respective impact on regional economic development and urbanization patterns across China. The results suggest large overall economic benefits from constructing the national expressway network and abolishing the Hukou system. Yet, the spatial impacts of the two policies are very different. The construction of the national expressway network reinforced existing urbanization patterns. The initially lagging regions not connected to the network have not benefitted much from its construction. By contrast, removal of the Hukou restrictions, which Chinese policy makers are considering, would result in much more widespread welfare gains, allowing everyone to gain by moving to where he or she is most productive. Removal of the Hukou restrictions would also promote urbanization in currently lagging (inland) regions, mostly by stimulating rural to urban migration.

This paper uses micro data from the Demographic National Survey and the Census in Romania (2002-2003) and in Countries that have received large number of Romanian immigrants over the period 1990-2000 (US, Austria and Spain) to identify the wage earning ability (skills) of migrants and returnees relative to non-migrants. This determines what is called 'selection'. Using observable characteristics (education, age, gender and family status) that affect wage earning abilities of non-migrant, migrants to specific countries and returnees the authors can construct measures of average selection across skills for each skill group. Also, by observing the actual wages of these groups in Romania, US, Austria and Spain the author can measure the average and the skills-specific premium for migrating and for returning. As the three receiving countries differ in their skill compensation structure we can test the hypothesis that migration to a country is larger for those groups that receive higher migration premium. The authors find strong support for the idea that migrants in different skill groups move depending on the premium that they will get in the receiving country. Similarly the authors find evidence of a premium to returnee that is increasing in their skills, which drives positive selection of returnees. As migration and return seem consistent with optimal utility-maximizing choices of individuals the authors use a model of education, migration and return to predict the effects of increasing international mobility on skill and wage of Romanians. The authors find average positive long-run effect on average skills and wages in Romania from relaxing migration constraint.