Category Archives: Immigration

Income Per Natural

As usual, excellent and exciting work from Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett:

Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural — the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare. The estimates differ substantially from traditional measures of GDP or GNI per resident, and not just for a handful of tiny countries. Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10 percent. The authors also show that poverty estimates are different for national residents and naturals; for example, 26 percent of Haitian naturals who are not poor by the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. These estimates are simply descriptive statistics and do not depend on any assumptions about how much of observed income differences across naturals is selection and how much is a pure location effect. Our conservative, if rough, estimate is that three quarters of this difference represents the effect of international migration on income per natural.

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

Hat tip to Wilkinson.

Rich country doctors’ stupid moral claims about poor country doctors

Pablo spots stupidity:

Rich countries are poaching so many African health workers that the practice should be viewed as a crime, a team of international disease experts say in the British medical journal The Lancet…“The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”

If anyone contributing to a phenomenon that might impede economic development is a criminal, we’re going to need a few more jails. Michael Clemens has already refuted this brand of moral nonsense:

“Ethical recruitment”, the mis-named practice mentioned in the BBC article of taking steps to block the hiring of African professionals, treats Africa as a homogenous mass because it applies to all countries indiscriminately.

If you think that limiting the movement of Ghanaian doctors is justified by the fact that Ghana doesn’t have enough doctors, ask yourself: Does Ghana have enough entrepreneurs? Does it have enough engineers? Does it have enough wise politicians? The answer is ‘no’ across the board, so the logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is that we will somehow develop Ghana if we stand at the airport and prevent all Ghanaians with any kind of skill from leaving, preventing them from accessing the very high-paying jobs to which most of us living in rich countries have access by birthright alone. That is ethically problematic at a minimum, as well as ineffective — trapping entrepreneurs in Ghana would not produce an efflorescence of investment.

In addition to being ethically questionable, the Lancet’s claim is factually incorrect. Clemens’ post also explains that the international movement of health care professionals is not a binding constraint on improving African health.

Rich country doctors' stupid moral claims about poor country doctors

Pablo spots stupidity:

Rich countries are poaching so many African health workers that the practice should be viewed as a crime, a team of international disease experts say in the British medical journal The Lancet…“The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”

If anyone contributing to a phenomenon that might impede economic development is a criminal, we’re going to need a few more jails. Michael Clemens has already refuted this brand of moral nonsense:

“Ethical recruitment”, the mis-named practice mentioned in the BBC article of taking steps to block the hiring of African professionals, treats Africa as a homogenous mass because it applies to all countries indiscriminately.

If you think that limiting the movement of Ghanaian doctors is justified by the fact that Ghana doesn’t have enough doctors, ask yourself: Does Ghana have enough entrepreneurs? Does it have enough engineers? Does it have enough wise politicians? The answer is ‘no’ across the board, so the logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is that we will somehow develop Ghana if we stand at the airport and prevent all Ghanaians with any kind of skill from leaving, preventing them from accessing the very high-paying jobs to which most of us living in rich countries have access by birthright alone. That is ethically problematic at a minimum, as well as ineffective — trapping entrepreneurs in Ghana would not produce an efflorescence of investment.

In addition to being ethically questionable, the Lancet’s claim is factually incorrect. Clemens’ post also explains that the international movement of health care professionals is not a binding constraint on improving African health.

Rich country doctors' stupid moral claims about poor country doctors

Pablo spots stupidity:

Rich countries are poaching so many African health workers that the practice should be viewed as a crime, a team of international disease experts say in the British medical journal The Lancet…“The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”

If anyone contributing to a phenomenon that might impede economic development is a criminal, we’re going to need a few more jails. Michael Clemens has already refuted this brand of moral nonsense:

“Ethical recruitment”, the mis-named practice mentioned in the BBC article of taking steps to block the hiring of African professionals, treats Africa as a homogenous mass because it applies to all countries indiscriminately.

If you think that limiting the movement of Ghanaian doctors is justified by the fact that Ghana doesn’t have enough doctors, ask yourself: Does Ghana have enough entrepreneurs? Does it have enough engineers? Does it have enough wise politicians? The answer is ‘no’ across the board, so the logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is that we will somehow develop Ghana if we stand at the airport and prevent all Ghanaians with any kind of skill from leaving, preventing them from accessing the very high-paying jobs to which most of us living in rich countries have access by birthright alone. That is ethically problematic at a minimum, as well as ineffective — trapping entrepreneurs in Ghana would not produce an efflorescence of investment.

In addition to being ethically questionable, the Lancet’s claim is factually incorrect. Clemens’ post also explains that the international movement of health care professionals is not a binding constraint on improving African health.

Lant Pritchett at Reason

Why did Reason wait five months to run this interview with Lant Pritchett, Harvard economist and author of Let Their People Come (free pdfs)? It’s great!

On institutions and migration:

[T]he beautiful thing about institutions that create property rights is that they’re a free good. If we allow in another 10 million, 20 million, 30 million people, then what has created American wealth—its economic institutions that allow entrepreneurship, that allow free markets, that allow people to innovate, that allow people opportunity—none of that is eroded by letting in more people.

America isn’t Kuwait. The wealth of Kuwait is that they’re sitting on this pool of oil. The wealth of America is that we have developed fantastically successful economic institutions. Those institutions are not zero sum. No one has suggested we should have limited America’s natural population growth because with 300 million people there are fewer benefits of our institutions of property rights to go around. It’s the same thing with migration.

On moral philosophy:

Right now all kinds of things that cause much smaller differences in human welfare get much more attention. If we say we are going to discriminate against ethnic Indians in Mexico vs. other citizens of Mexico, there would be a hue and cry across the world. But if we say we’re going to discriminate in favor of people of Mexican descent born in the United States vs. people of Mexican descent born in Mexico, this creates absolutely no moral outrage.

Do free traders neglect immigration?

At the end of a post about Social Security, Dean Baker implies free traders are lax in supporting freer immigration to the United States. At the risk of taking his closing quip too seriously, here’s why I am not fully persuaded.

Most economists who support freer trade also support freer immigration. Heck, Jagdish Bhagwati even has a version of his biography tailored to focus on immigration. And 500 economists signed a petition supporting more open immigration. So, although they could always do better, I think free traders are fulfilling their responsibility of advocating freer immigration. (One reason their contribution may be underappreciated is that economics is less central to the debate about immigration policy than trade policy.)

Then there are non-economist free traders. Here, Baker’s case holds up better. For example, the Heritage Foundation has used the argument that trade and migration are substitutes as a reason to support trade deals. On the other hand, Cato’s free traders are staunchly pro-immigration.

Two questions:

(1) Can anyone name an economist who is a notable free trader but opposes more liberal immigration policy?
(2) Are economists devoting too much of their policy influence to trade and not enough to migration?