Future Changes in Age Structure and Different Migration Scenarios

Highlights 1. We need to rethink the migration system. Emerging flows, increasing return migration, and new places of origin and destination are reshaping the regional migratory dynamic. 2. Demographic indicators are converging in the region. Declining fertility and population growth anticipate that South to North migration will not reach the historical peaks. 3. Differences in age structure result in distinctive migration dynamics. The rapid aging process within the region, particularly in North America, will drive the need for care work and other services, creating incentives for certain types of migration. 4. There is a mismatch between migration dynamics and policy responses. Current immigration policies are not in line with traditional and emerging patterns in the three main destinations, Canada, US, and Mexico, regarding management, control, and integration. 5. The current population dynamics of this migration system offer a unique opportunity to manage migration efficiently. Migration within the region will influence how the six countries fare economically, politically and socially. To capitalize the potential benefits of migration, we need a strategy that incorporates an approach based on shared responsibilities.

Population Studies

Young adults migrate more than older people. As populations in many countries get older, this may affect out-migration-and thus immigration to other countries. This is not usually accounted for in projections of future immigration, even though considerable ageing is expected globally. We show how United Nations projections of future age profiles in origin regions can be combined with those regions' emigration rates by age group to improve national projections of immigration to a destination country, exemplified by Norway. Using various methods for projecting future migration, we show that projected immigration tends to be lower when taking expected ageing in origin regions into account. This may have a considerable effect on population projections: for Norway, taking changing age profiles in origin regions into account in immigration projections would have an effect on the projected population of Norway equivalent to that of reducing the fertility assumptions by 0.1 children per woman.

NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN 508+STR, 47pp, 2014

The demographic features of a growing number of international migrants increasingly impacts socioeconomic development in various countries of the world. However, information on international migrant’s demographic characteristics is sparse. To develop the multiregional population/urbanization projections module of the NCAR Community Demographic Model (CDM) requires information on the age and gender composition of international migration streams. This paper reports on the methods used to generate the CDM International Migration dataset, which contains information on the age and gender profiles of international migrants with approximate global coverage. We use the raw data from the United Nations Global Migration Database (UNGMD) to derive the highest quality migrant stock for two time points closest to the year 2000. We reallocate the migrants into standardized age and gender categories by using information directly from the selected file, by borrowing information from files of other years, and by applying aggregated region-level information. After accounting for the impacts of mortality and fertility, we derive the age and gender profiles of net migrant flows between the two time points for each migration stream. The newly generated dataset contains age and gender profiles of international migrants for 3,713 country-level migration streams. Validation analyses against existing data sources and against the geographical, historical, and political context demonstrate reasonably high data quality. This data set not only meets our requirement for population projections, but can also be used for the study of international migration behavior among subgroups of various socioeconomic and environmental backgrounds.

Latin America, in general, is a great geographic, social, political, economic and cultural mosaic and, especially in the demographic field, is far from being a homogeneous aggregate. There have always been, and there are still today, differences between the various countries belonging to this geographical area, both in the ways in which the demographic phenomena have evolved and, mainly, in the times the different steps took for the evolutionary process regarding each of them. This paper will try to monitor the demographic evolution of the countries examined 1 in the period between the five-year periods 1985-1990 and 2015-2020. In addition, it will identify the possible existence of groupings of countries, similar within them and heterogeneous among them, through the cluster analysis technique, thus highlighting some explanatory indicators that have allowed the above mentioned evolution. The results obtained have led to think that it is necessary to study the economic, social, cultural and institutional aspects of every population, thus being able to cope with differential studies on the mortality and fertility of any population in order to interpret demographic phenomena.

1967

Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, 2016

Migration and the Demographic Shift * This chapter connects population aging with international migration. After documenting the trends for both, we review the supply-push and demand-pull determinants of migration, focusing particularly on the role of age and aging. We subsequently discuss the literature concerning the implications of migration in the context of aging for labor markets, health and public budgets including the political economy context. Although immigration is sometimes suggested as a solution for the aging problem, the existing academic literature from different fields is more cautious about its role and potential. While large-scale selective immigration might contribute to alleviating demographic pressures, it is unlikely that immigration will increase to the unrealistically large numbers needed.

IMF Working Papers, 2017

The paper develops a simple, integrated methodology to project public pension cash flows and healthcare spending over the long term. We illustrate its features by applying it to the LAC5 (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico), where public spending pressures are expected to increase significantly over 2015-50 due to demographic trends and rising healthcare costs. We simulate alternative pension reforms, including the transition from a defined benefit to a defined contribution pension system and the fiscal burden of a minimum guaranteed pension under the latter. We also analyze public healthcare outlays in the LAC5, which is likewise expected to increase significantly over 2015-50 due to aging and the so-called excess cost growth factor of healthcare services, showing that curbing the evolution of the latter (e.g., through enhanced competition in the healthcare sector) could aid in containing spending pressures. Despite its simplicity, the methodology yields projections that compare well with other approaches. It therefore provides a good benchmark for assessing alternative reform scenarios, particularly in data-constrained countries.

In this paper a method to model and forecast international immigration, emigration and net migration by age and sex is proposed. This method is based on Lee’s 1993 model, which is an extension of the well-known Lee-Carter model (Lee & Carter, 1992). The method proposed allows forecasting migration consistently with the whole population dynamic in the sense that it incorporates sustainable migration levels. This sustainability is incorporated through a logistic transformation of total migration, and it allows constraining the migration’s fluctuation and thus avoiding negative values in a total population forecast. The method is applied to recent estimates of Mexican immigration, emigration and net migration by age and sex from 1960 to 2010 made by the Mexican Society of Demography (SOMEDE, 2011). The predictive power of the model is tested forecasting the period 1991 to 2010 and comparing the results with estimates for such period.

2021

Although the scarcity of accurate and accessible data on international migration flows typically prevents a full understanding of migratory patterns, this might not be the case for Latin America, where high-quality census data on migrant flows is publicly available through the project International Migration in Latina America (IMILA). However, such data has mostly been used for research at the regional level because of the fragmented nature of their availability and the lack of English documentation. To tackle this issue, we consolidated data from the IMILA collection to provide a harmonized dataset with five-year flows by country of birth, sex, and age group, for 19 countries of destination and five census waves. Moreover, comparing IMILA to other two available data sources on flows to Latin America, we showed that IMILA provides a more accurate assessment of migration flows from North America and Europe, enables a better quantification of minor migration flows, and enhances the visibility of female migration. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) 6,7 or the World Bank (WB). Some of these estimates have incorporated return migration as a component of the global flows 5 , or have been broken down by sex 1. While indirect methods fill important data gaps, their quality, and the quality of the data sources used to generate estimates is difficult to assess, especially in low-income countries. For the case of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, high-quality census data on both long-term migrant stocks and five-year migrant stocks are typically available. This is essentially golden standard data against which all other estimates