Title: Internal migration and education: A cross-national comparison,
Abstract: Migration the main process shaping patterns of human settlement within and
between countries. It is widely acknowledged to be integral to the process of
human development as it plays a significant role in enhancing educational
outcomes. At regional and national levels, internal migration underpins the
efficient functioning of the economy by bringing knowledge and skills to the
locations where they are needed. It is the multi-dimensional nature of
migration that underlines its significance in the process of human development.
Human mobility extends in the spatial domain from local travel to international
migration, and in the temporal dimension from short-term stays to permanent
relocations. Classification and measurement of such phenomena is inevitably
complex, which has severely hindered progress in comparative research, with
very few large-scale cross-national comparisons of migration. The linkages
between migration and education have been explored in a separate line of
inquiry that has predominantly focused on country-specific analyses as to the
ways in which migration affects educational outcomes and how educational
attainment affects migration behaviour. A recurrent theme has been the
educational selectivity of migrants, which in turn leads to an increase of
human capital in some regions, primarily cities, at the expense of others.
Questions have long been raised as to the links between education and migration
in response to educational expansion, but have not yet been fully answered
because of the absence, until recently, of adequate data for comparative
analysis of migration. In this paper, we bring these two separate strands of
research together to systematically explore links between internal migration
and education across a global sample of 57 countries at various stages of
development, using data drawn from the IPUMS database.