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# **1 INTRODUCTION**

We observe today large disparities in the distribution of jobs across countries and regions. The best jobs are in urban areas, in large and cosmopolitan cities, often in the Northern Hemisphere. In rural areas, small towns, conflict or arid regions, mainly in the Southern Hemisphere, most workers are self-employed, either as subsistence farmers or own-account workers in small, very low-productivity, household enterprises. Many of them are poor or extreme poor.<sup>2</sup> Policies to promote better job opportunities “locally” are a very important part of the development agenda. But these policies will, most likely, be insufficient; structural transformations and better job prospects involve facilitating the movement of people within and across countries to realize their aspirations for better livelihoods.<sup>3</sup> Given these disparities, it is no surprise that one in seven of the world’s population today are migrants (residing in another place than where they were born). Internal migrants are much more numerous though than international migrants (750 million versus 250 million, respectively) and the share of South-South migration is larger than the share of migrants having moved from South to North (38 versus 34 percent respectively), despite the media’s focus on international, South-North migration.

Global trends are increasing incentives to migrate to improve job opportunities and quality of life. High labor income and amenity gaps remain within and between countries (Milanovic, 2012) and may rise further with the ongoing digital revolution (Raja and Christiaensen, 2017).<sup>4</sup> At the same time, migration costs are falling, following technological and institutional change.<sup>5</sup> Greater access to information also raises aspirations. People can now better witness how others are doing and observe how folks, like themselves, have made good on their move to a new land. In addition, diverging demographics between rich and poor countries create win-win opportunities to connect people to better jobs. While Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are struggling to productively absorb their youth bulge in the labor market, western (European) countries and Japan will face labor shortages as well as rising fiscal pressures to finance the cost of caring for 2 Eighty percent of the extreme poor live in rural areas (World Bank, 2016a).

> 3 Of the 250 million international migrants, an estimated 150 million are migrant _workers_ (ILO, 2015). Better perceived income earning opportunities at destination are also an important motivation for many prospective _internal_ migrants, though access to public services also plays an important role (Dustmann and Okatenko, 2014). Migration further constitutes a “safety valve or even safety net” to escape/manage conflict and environmental shocks.  By the end of 2015, the estimated number of forcefully displaced due to conflict and violence rose to 65 million.  Increasingly, many are also displaced by natural disasters (19.2 million in 2015) (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2017).

4 Even if the prospects in the sending areas improve, this may at first increase, rather than reduce, migration, by relaxing financing constraints. For international migration from low-income countries, Clemens (2014) estimates that this continues until countries reach about PPP$7,000/capita.

5 For example, studying real migration costs from Kerala, India to the countries of the Arabian Gulf (GCC), Seshan (2017) reports a 50 percent decline on average between 1980 and 2014, driven by a reduction in visa fees and air ticket prices, partly also through the establishment of social migration networks. Following the ICT revolution, communication has also become much cheaper and information much more widely accessible. Lu, Xie and Xu (2016) illustrate the importance of such developments. They document how access to landline phones in rural China increased the ratio of out-migrant workers by 2 percentage points or about 50 percent of the sample mean in China. This followed from increased information about access to job opportunities and especially, the ability to maintain regular contact with left-behind family members.