IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jitecd/v34y2025i6p1517-1533.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Emigration and tax revenue

Author

Listed:
  • Yuanyuan Gu
  • Jhorland Ayala Garcia

Abstract

The World Migration Report 2020 shows that the number of international migrants increased from 84 million in 1970–272 million in 2019, accounting for 3.5% of the world’s population. This paper investigates the aggregated effect of emigration on the tax revenue of sending countries with a focus on developing nations. Using a gravity approach, we construct a time-varying exogenous instrument out of measures of changes in transportation technology from geographic time-invariant dyadic characteristics. Then, we follow an instrumental variable approach where we use our predicted emigration rate as an instrument of the observed migration rate. The results show that the predicted emigration rate is a good instrument of the current emigration rate for developing countries, and that there is a positive aggregated effect of emigration on tax revenue of sending countries. The results vary depending on the type of tax: emigration increases goods and services tax revenue, but it decreases income, profit, and capital gains tax revenue.

Suggested Citation

  • Yuanyuan Gu & Jhorland Ayala Garcia, 2025. "Emigration and tax revenue," The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(6), pages 1517-1533, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jitecd:v:34:y:2025:i:6:p:1517-1533
    DOI: 10.1080/09638199.2024.2389875
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09638199.2024.2389875
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09638199.2024.2389875?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jitecd:v:34:y:2025:i:6:p:1517-1533. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJTE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.