Impact of Migration Processes on GDP

Abstract

The globalization process and the war in Ukraine show us that migration is one of the strongest global trends in the modern economy. For this paper, we determined three types of migration, depending on the intention of the people involved, these being labor, educational, and refugee migration. Each type has a different influence on the macroeconomic process. However, in this paper, we investigate the influence of general migration on GDP. We analyze five factors that have major influences on GDP, namely, migration (I), interest rate (IR), active population (AP), export (E), and the consumer price index (CPI). For the purposes of this paper, vector autoregressive models (VAR models) were chosen to perform the analysis. We used the Granger causality test to investigate the lag structure and identified the exogenous variables in the VAR model, such as GDP, migration, and the active population. We investigated the cross-influence between these factors and found that migration has a negative effect on the active population and a positive effect on GDP, while GDP growth leads to a decrease in migration. The Akaike and Schwartz criteria showed the high quality of the VAR models. The impulse analysis of shock influences identifies the structure of the reaction seen in GDP and migration, depending on their shock factors. Using decomposition analysis, we found that migration and GDP influence each other by 10–14%, which can improve the forecasting of these factors and the study of structural migration by the use of these three types.

Keywords

• migration
• GDP
• VAR-model
• impact