Showing papers by "Robert E. Lucas published in 2001"

The effects of proximity and transportation on developing country population migrations

Abstract: I am grateful to Richard Arnott, John Harris and two anonymous referees for a number of suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

Diaspora and Development: Highly Skilled Migrants from East Asia

Abstract: a. The nature of international networks b. Remittances and capital flows c. Links between international trade and migration d. Technology transfers 6. Factors Affecting the International Migration of Highly Skilled People p.32 a. Receiving country policies b. Study abroad c. Return migration 7. Future Prospects Abstract Three principal streams may be discerned among emigrants from East Asia: to the Pacific rim OECD countries, to the Middle East, and to other countries within the East Asian region. The last of these reflects a migration transition that has occurred among the higher income countries within the region: Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand have each become significant hosts to migrant populations. In most instances, unskilled migrants dominate these inflows, typically admitted temporarily or illegally. Meanwhile, overall emigration from these relatively affluent countries has diminished, though a significant brain drain continues to the Pacific rim OECD nations. Meanwhile, China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam have yet to undergo any transition to become hosts to significant numbers of foreign nationals and emigration from these countries is a mix of highly skilled and less skilled workers. The movement of tertiary educated people from East Asia to North America and Australasia is large in absolute terms. By 2000, 61 percent of East Asian adults in the US had attended college or graduate school, with an estimated 840 thousand, college-educated adults from the Philippines, 480 thousand from China, 440 thousand from Korea, 265 thousand from Taiwan and nearly 300 thousand from Vietnam. From each of the People's Republic of China, the Philippines and Korea more than 200,000 college or graduate school trained adults are estimated to have entered the US alone, net of departures, between 1994 and 2000. Moreover, data from 1997 indicate nearly half a million East Asian born scientists and engineers living in the US. In Canada and Australia in 1996, there were over a million and over half a million people living, respectively, who had been born in East Asia and the skill-based visa system guaranteed that the majority of these were skilled. For countries such as the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan these numbers are large relative to their total stocks of tertiary educated population; for China this is less true though these highly skilled emigrants have been drawn from just a few coastal areas of China where the incidence of departure is consequently quite extraordinary. The traditional assumption is that loss …

The Rise in Union Wage Premiums in South Africa

Abstract: The earnings premium received by African, urban, male union members in South Africa, as compared to other regular, urban male employees, is explored using two national sample surveys conducted in 1985 and 1993. The historical setting of this change is of particular interest, in the light of the transformation from the apartheid regime. Union membership grew very rapidly during this interval, as earlier prohibitions on African unions were lifted. Subsequently, the high rates of unemployment and segmentation of the labor force have been issues of central concern to the new government, elected in 1994. In this context, the paper extends prior methodology, by systematically comparing possible approaches to estimation, in addition to contributing fresh empirical results. Four approaches to estimation are adopted, allowing for: a single earnings regime with union dummy variable; the possibility of different earnings regimes among union members as compared to non-members; endogenous switching between such regimes; sample selection arising from lack of employment and from division between regular and informal work. A series of tests on nested specifications indicate the importance of recognizing endogenous switching between differing pay structures in the covered and uncovered sectors. However (as with previous research on the South African labor market), no sample selection is detected with respect to employment status. The results suggest that collective bargaining resulted in wage compression among the expanding union membership while significantly widening the gap between members and non-members. The latter widening gap cannot be attributed to the changing composition of union membership as reflected in observed characteristics of employees.