We incorporate an endogenous choice of qualification into a standard New Economic Geography model: workers can choose to invest time to acquire skills in order to work in the industrial sector and earn a higher wage. Hence, expenditures in a given country depend on the number of firms in that country, giving rise to a standard circular causation mechanism as in Krugman [9]. However, our model r...

This paper tests the impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on (1) rural-urban migration; (2) urban unemployment and (3) Inequality in India. We use the simple Harris-Todaro framework to analyze the labor market outcomes of this policy intervention. We use district level data from two rounds of National Sample Survey (NSSO) to compare districts where the NREGS was laun...

This chapter deals with the economic and ethnic diversity caused by international labor migration, and their economic integration possibilities. It brings together three strands of literature dealing with the neoclassical economic assimilation, ethnic identities and attitudes towards immigrants and the natives, and provides an analysis in understanding their interactions. The issue of how immig...

Fifteen years after German reunification, the facts about slow regional convergence have born out the prediction of Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has accelerated in recent years. To understand these patterns, I provide an extension of the standard lab...

This pamphlet describes some recent findings reported in the UN's "State of World Population, 1993." The summary focuses on the costs and benefits of migration, investments in technology in order to attract low cost labor, and impetus for migration from economic development. A recent study in the Philippines indicates that reduced migration pressures will require increased capacity to migrate b...