Quantmig Migration Estimates: A New, Harmonised Set of Probabilistic Migration Flow Estimates for Europe, 2009-19

Georgios Aristotelous, University of Southampton
Peter W. F. Smith, University of Southampton
Jakub Bijak , University of Southampton

In this paper, we present harmonised probabilistic estimates of migration flows among 32 countries in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), and North Macedonia, as well as to and from the rest of the world, based on publicly-available Eurostat data. The estimation is based on an updated and expanded approach of the Integrated Modelling of European Migration (IMEM) project, originally applied to data for 2002-2008 and in the current version extended to 2009-2019 as a part of the QuantMig research programme (www.quantmig.eu). The estimates are obtained by using a hierarchical Bayesian model and are naturally accompanied by measures of uncertainty. The estimation model has two levels: the higher-level migration model, based on a range of socio-economic drivers of migration, imputes the missing data, and the lower-level measurement model corrects the reported official statistics according to their quality characteristics, mainly bias and variance. The estimated migration flows relate to long-term migrants, moving for 12 months or longer, as defined in the EC Regulation 862/2007 on migration and asylum statistics. The estimated flows are presented by countries of origin and destination, age, sex, and the region of birth. In addition to the estimates, the paper also presents key findings related to data quality, illuminates trade-offs between data harmonization and availability since the Regulation 862/2007 came into force, and reflects on possible reasons of discontinuities between the IMEM and QuantMig figures. Both sets of estimates are available online from an interactive QuantMig Migration Estimates Explorer, at https://bit.ly/quantmig-estimates.

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 Presented in Session 13. Flash session Data Infrastructures for Population Research