One consequence of the trade and technology driven increases in skill premia in the older industrial regions since the 1980s has been a perceived “skill shortage” in those regions, along with freer migration of skilled and professional workers from developing regions. While skilled migration flows remain too small to have large short-run effects on labour markets, a further opening to skilled migrants by the industrialised North could see substantial changes in labour markets and overall growth performance. The links between demographic change, migration flows and economic growth are here explored using a new demographic sub-model that is integrated with an adaptation of the GTAP-Dynamic global economic model in which regional households are disaggregated by age and gender. Skilled migration flows are assumed to be motivated by real wage differences to an extent that is variably constrained by immigration policies. A uniform relaxation of these constraints has most effect on labour markets in the traditional migrant destinations, Australia, Western Europe and North America, where it restrains the skill premium and substantially enhances GDP growth. Skill premia are raised, however, in regions of origin, and particularly in South Asia, although the extent of this is shown to depend sensitively on the responsiveness of skill acquisition to regional skill premia.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Australian National University, College of Business and Economics, School of Economics in its series ANUCBE School of Economics Working Papers with number
2006-468.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.