The authors call on G20 leaders to extend more predictable and substantial support to low-and-middle-income countries that host refugees, in recognition of the global public good that these countries ...provide. Together with other high-income countries, G20 countries should fully cover the cost of providing for the basic and social needs of refugees. They should also help to expand public services and infrastructure for refugees as well as resident populations. Such international support for the economic integration and social inclusion of refugees will be most effective if host countries grant refugees a firm legal status with access to employment and entrepreneurship.
We use a double-calibrated general equilibrium model to decompose the growth of the high-skilled wage premium in the UK from 1979 to 2000 into a range of potential contributory factors. This ...structural approach ensures that the model used is consistent with both price and quantity data simultaneously, and allows us to investigate a wide range of plausible parameter values. We find that the small observed rise in the skill premium is the net outcome of a set of opposing effects, some of which are large. In particular, the negative effect on the skill premium from the rising supply of skilled labour is mostly offset by the factor bias of technical change in favour of skilled labour. To this extent our work supports previous labour-market based studies, but is novel in showing that these are consistent with trade price and volume changes in a general equilibrium framework. If we assume a production technology dominated by capital-skill complementarity, the fall in capital prices (positive effect on the skill premium) and the sector bias of technical change in favour of unskilled-labour-intensive sectors (negative effect) also become quantitatively important. The impact of international trade and consumer preferences on the skill premium is mostly positive, and while not large compared to the role of factor bias, it is still significant as a proportion of to the net change in the wage premium. We conclude that a structural model such as ours provides robust insights into the processes that drive the skill premium. At the same time, while we treat the rise in the supply of skilled labour as exogenous, future research might usefully aim to endogenize skill acquisition decisions and labour market policies with a more fully dynamic modelling technique.
We investigate the interplay of language skills and immigrant stocks in determining bilateral FDI out-stocks of OECD reporting countries. Applying a Poisson panel estimator to 2004-2011 data, we find ...robust evidence for a positive effect of bilateral immigrants on bilateral FDI - provided that residents of the two countries have few language skills in common. We find a similar effect for immigrants from third countries that speak the language(s) of the FDI host country, making them potential substitutes for bilateral migrants. Our findings suggest that immigrants facilitate outgoing FDI through their language skills, rather than through other characteristics like cultural familiarity.
Migrant remittances, particularly when transferred through the banking system, may contribute to financial development in migrants' home countries. We analyse the determinants of the choice of ...transfer channel (formal services versus informal operators or personal transfers) by Moldovan migrants in 2006. We estimate a multinomial logit model from household survey data. Our explanatory variables include socio‐economic characteristics of the migrant and other household members, the pattern of migration (destination country, legal status, duration), and financial information (average amount and frequency of payments). Key reasons not to use a formal transfer channel are a migrant's emphasis on low transfer cost (rather than speed, convenience or security), irregular legal status in the host country, and short migration spells. Our findings demonstrate that migrants' transnational capacities and activities in their entirety bear upon the choice of transfer channel; any policy interventions to promote the use of formal channels should reflect this.
Do the sovereign wealth funds of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan promote the sustainable use of government oil revenues? We review the operational rules and performance of the two funds and compare them to ...Norway's Government Pension Fund – Global. The key challenges are to stabilize government expenditures despite volatile resource prices, build up a capital stock to draw on after the resource is depleted, and to save and spend resource revenues transparently. We conclude that the institutional framework of a resource fund may indeed enhance transparency and public scrutiny, limit discretionary control, and sustain public support for long-term savings of resource revenues.
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