# 3.2 Labor force data per education level

It is relatively easier to identify the number and average education level of workers in each country of the world. Several data sources can be used to assess the size and skill structure of the labor force of each country. The size of the working-age labor force (i.e. population aged 25 and over) is provided by the United Nations. Data is missing for a few countries but can be estimated using the CIA world factbook.<sup>8</sup> Labor force data is then split across skill groups using international indicators of education attainment. Here, we follow Docquier and Marfouk (2006) and Docquier, Lowell and Marfouk (2009) in combining di¤erent data sets documenting the proportion of postsecondary educated workers in the population aged 25 and over. They use De La Fuente and Domenech (2006) for OECD countries and Barro and Lee (2001) for non-OECD countries. For countries where Barro and Lee’s measures are missing, they estimate the proportions educated using Cohen and Soto’s measures (see Cohen and Soto, 2007). In the remaining countries where both Barro–Lee and Cohen–Soto data are missing (about 70 countries in 2000), they apply the educational proportions of the neighboring country having the closest enrollment rate in secondary/tertiary education, or the closest GDP per capita.

# 3.3 Description and summary statistics for our sample

Table 1 shows the 1990-2000 ‡ows of immigrants, emigrants and their di¤erence (net migration) for a set of ten large Western European countries and four other groups: (i) three Anglo-Saxon non-European countries (US, Canada and Australia) traditionally attracting large numbers of immigrants, (ii) three large Eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) with a range of emigration rates, mostly to Western Europe, (iii) two middle income countries with large emigration rates (Mexico and Turkey) and (iv) three non-OECD countries with large immigration rates (Argentina, South Africa and Singapore). We focus on the 1990-2000 ‡ows for several reasons. First, they are the most recent ‡ows that one can construct for both immigration and emigration (based on censuses) hence their skill composition and size is more relevant and possibly closer to later migration ‡ows during the 2000’s.<sup>9</sup> One could also assess with our method the labor market impact of the total stock of immigrants and emigrants across countries (reported for 1990 and 2000 in Table A3 of the Table Appendix). However the stock is accumulated over many decades and re‡ects migration that took place in the far past. Hence the migrant stock is less relevant to establish recent labor market e¤ects of immigration and emigration.

Several features of migration ‡ows are worth emphasizing. First, the US, Canada and Australia have much larger immigration (between 4.4 and 10.6%) than emigration (between 0.2 and 1.3%) rates among the highly educated portion of the labor force. The US is the only country with a comparable rate of immigration of less educated (5.8%) while both the immigration and emigration of low skilled is small in Canada and Australia. In Western Europe, high skilled immigration rates range from 0.2% (Greece) to 8.5% (the UK) while the emigration rates range between 1.1% (France and Germany) and 8.1% (Portugal). Em-

> 8See http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook.

> 9Clearly it would be best to have the ‡ow of migrants between 2000 and 2010 but this will be available only in a few years as the Censuses from the 2010 round are collected, processed and made public.

10