Relationship between income inequality and net migration in Africa

What is it about?

This study examines the relationship between income inequality and net migration in Africa over the past two decades. Net migration rates from 54 countries between 2001 and 2021 are matched to inequality, controlling for origin country unemployment, income per capita, as well as foreign direct investment and economic uncertainty in a fixed-effects panel model. Inequality is gauged by the share of income accruing to the top decile of the income distribution. The results indicate that greater inequality is associated with higher net migration rates, as opposed to foreign investment and uncertainty, which are found to be negatively associated with net migration. When replicating the experiment for the different regions—East, Middle, North, South and West Africa—, these results hold in all cases except in West Africa, where the coefficients are not found to be statistically significant. Overall, the analysis suggests that over the past two decades, increasingly unequal income distributions in Africa were associated with higher proportions of people entering than leaving African countries, while economic uncertainty, foreign investment, and unemployment tended to have the opposite effect in most African regions.

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Photo by 2Photo Pots on Unsplash

Photo by 2Photo Pots on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The recent humanitarian crisis in Ceuta has once again highlighted the importance of properly managing migration flows. To this end, it is necessary to delve deeper into the determinants of this phenomenon and to explore how these differ across regions. In this respect, this study aims to shed light on the impact of income inequality, along with unemployment and other macroeconomic variables, on migration patterns in different African regions. The findings not only reveal significant regional differences but also challenge some common misconceptions about migration.

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