Quantifying the International Bilateral Movements of Migrants

This paper presents five versions of an international bilateral migration stock database for 226 by 226 countries. The first four versions each consist of two matrices, the first containing migrants defined by country of birth i.e. the foreign born population, the second, by nationality i.e. the foreign population. Wherever possible, the information is collected from the latest round of censuses (generally 2000/01), though older data are included where this information was unavailable. The first version of the matrices contains as much data as could be collated at the time of writing but also contains gaps. The later versions progressively employ a variety of techniques to estimate the missing data. The final matrix, comprising only the foreign born, attempts to reconcile all of the available information to provide the researcher with a single and complete matrix of international bilateral migrant stocks. Although originally created to supplement the GMig model (Walmsley and Winters 2005) it is hoped that the data will be found useful in a wide range of applications both in economics and other disciplines.