Until more recently there has been conspicuously little systematic empirical
work to address the causal question of immigration with respect to Europe. Most of
the literature focuses on single country case studies; Germany and the U.K. get the
bulk of the attention.2
A new set of empirical literature is beginning to emerging,
however.3
These studies generally find support for traditional economic variables
while some non-traditional variables described above get mixed reviews. However,
it has only been recently that authors have begun to apply some form of the gravity
model as the basis for examining immigration flows, see for example GallardoSejas
et al. (2006) and Lewer and Van den Berg (2008). The lack of empirical studies
is puzzling since standard theoretical immigration models such as Sjaastad (1962)
and Borjas (1987) resemble gravitational models.
This paper develops and tests an extended gravity model of international
migration for twelve European countries over a long-run time horizon (1991 to
2010). Scaled OLS econometric methodology of Wang and Winters (1992) and
Eichengreen and Irwin (1995) is applied to the panel data, and indicates that the
stock of immigrants from the source country already living in the destination
country, population size, destination country income, common language, work
opportunity, and institutional effectiveness all significantly increase the flow of
immigration to the European sample countries, while geographical distance erodes
the flow of immigration.
This paper proceeds as follows: section II discusses the traditional gravity model
of international trade that has been so widely applied, section III develops an
immigration models based on gravitational factors, section IV reveals the
econometric methodology applied in this article, section V reports the estimates
from the gravity based functions, and section VI concludes and offers future research
direction.