Managing Migration: The Role of Economic Instruments

This paper reviews economic policies and instruments available to the developed countries to reduce unwanted migration from developing countries, not all of which is irregular migration. Countries generally welcome legal immigrants and visitors, try to make it unnecessary for people to become refugees and asylum seekers, and try to discourage, detect, and remove irregular foreigners. There are three major themes: 1. There are as many reasons for migration as there are migrants, and the distinction between migrants motivated by economic and non–economic considerations is often blurred. Perhaps the best analogy is to a river – what begins as one channel that can be managed with a dam can become a series of rivulets forming a delta, making migration far more difficult to manage. 2. The keys to reducing unwanted migration lie mostly in emigration countries, but trade and investment fostered by immigration countries can accelerate economic and job growth in both emigration and immigration countries, and make trading in goods a substitute for economically motivated migration. Trade and economic integration had the effect of slowing emigration from Europe to the Americas, between southern Europe and northern Europe, and in Asian Tiger countries such as South Korea and Malaysia. However, the process of moving toward freer trade and economic integration can also increase migration in the short term, producing a migration hump, and requiring cooperation between emigration and immigration destinations so that the threat of more migration does not slow economic integration and growth. 3. Aid, intervention, and remittances can help reduce unwanted migration, but experience shows that there are no assurances that such aid, intervention, and remittances would, in fact, lead migrants to stay at home. The better use of remittances to promote development, which at US$65 billion in 1999 exceeded the US$56 billion in official development assistance (ODA), is a promising area for cooperation between migrants and their areas of origin, as well as emigration and immigration countries. There are two ways that differences between countries can be narrowed: migration alone in a world without free trade, or migration and trade in an open economy. Migration will eventually diminish in both cases, but there is an important difference between reducing migration pressures in a closed or open world economy. In a closed economy, economic differences can narrow as wages fall in the immigration country, a sure recipe for an anti–immigrant backlash. By contrast, in an open economy, economic differences can be narrowed as wages rise faster in the emigration country. Areas for additional research and exploration of policy options include: (1) how to phase in freer trade, investment, and economic integration to minimize unwanted migration; (2) strategies to increase the job–creating impacts of remittances, perhaps by using aid to match remittances that are invested in job–creating ways.     

Best Practice Options: Yugoslavia

Several Cooperative Efforts to Manage Emigration (CEME) members visited the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in early June 2001 to examine the new Government's approach to migration issues. We found that both the Federal Government and the Serb Republic are faced with three principal issues related to immigration and refugees that require substantial cooperation with North American and European countries that are donors of international aid, as well as recipients of Yugoslav migrants and third country nationals transiting the FRY.
First, they are faced with migration issues that the international community considers priorities, including demilitarizing border management; combating human smuggling and trafficking; and drafting and implementing an aliens law, which includes asylum policies and procedures consistent with international standards.
Second, they need to plan for the return or integration of 350,000 refugees from Croatia and Bosnia, and another 150,000 internally displaced Yugoslavs from Kosovo, primarily by offering dual citizenship in the FRY, and Croatia and Bosnia so refugees can integrate in the FRY, but retain rights and privileges according to Croatians or Bosnians.
Third, it is important to build bridges to Yugoslavs abroad in order to attract remittances and the return of the professionals needed to rebuild the FRY.     

Adolescents' and Mothers' Understanding of Children's Rights in the Home

Adolescents' and mothers' understanding of children's self‐determination and nurturance rights was examined in the context of the home. In individual interviews, 141 sixth, eighth, and tenth graders and their mothers responded to hypothetical vignettes in which a child story character wished to exercise a right that conflicted with parental practices. For each vignette, participants were asked to judge whether the story character should have the right in question and to provide a justification for their decision. Generally, eighth and tenth graders were more likely than their mothers to endorse requests for self‐determination and less likely than their mothers to support requests for nurturance. Mothers of tenth graders were more likely to support requests for self‐determination and less likely to favor adolescents' request for nurturance in the home than were mothers of sixth and eighth graders. In terms of reasoning, adolescents and mothers were more likely to consider the individuals' rights when discussing self‐determination situations, whereas nurturance situations elicited responses pertaining to participants' understanding of familial roles and relationships. Furthermore, mothers' reasoning about childrenà s rights reflected sensitivity to the developmental level of their children. The findings are discussed in terms of previous research on the development of children's understanding of rights and adolescent autonomy.     

TEACHING PROFESSIONAL WRITING TO FAMILY THERAPISTS: THREE APPROACHES

The authors present three educational approaches designed to demystify the writing process and to support better writing skills among family therapists. One framework is an academic course in professional writing, another is a writing seminar for family therapy and physician trainees within a medical school setting, and the third is a 2-hour continuing education writing workshop for family therapists. Each is replicable within a variety of settings.     

Design optimization using ANOVA

This paper describes the design optimization of a robot sensor used for locating 3-D objects employing the Taguchi method in a computer simulation scenario. The location information from the sensor is to be utilized to control the movements of an industrial robot in a 'pick-and-place' or assembly operation. The Taguchi method, which is based on the Analysis-of-Variance (ANOVA) approach, is utilized to improve the performance of the sensor over a wider operating range. A review of the Taguchi method is presented along with step-by-step implementation details to identify and optimize the design parameters of the sensor. The method allows us to gauge the impact of various interactions present in the sensor system exclusively and permits us to single out those factors that have a dominant influence on the overall performance of the sensor. The investigation suggests that the Taguchi method is a more structured and efficient approach for achieving a robust design compared with the classical full factorial design approach.     

LOG-PERIODOGRAM ESTIMATION OF LONG MEMORY VOLATILITY DEPENDENCIES WITH CONDITIONALLY HEAVY TAILED RETURNS

Many recent papers have used semiparametric methods, especially the log-periodogram regression, to detect and estimate long memory in the volatility of asset returns. In these papers, the volatility is proxied by measures such as squared, log-squared, and absolute returns. While the evidence for the existence of long memory is strong using any of these measures, the actual long memory parameter estimates can be sensitive to which measure is used. In Monte-Carlo simulations, I find that if the data is conditionally leptokurtic, the log-periodogram regression estimator using squared returns has a large downward bias, which is avoided by using other volatility measures. In United States stock return data, I find that squared returns give much lower estimates of the long memory parameter than the alternative volatility measures, which is consistent with the simulation results. I conclude that researchers should avoid using the squared returns in the semiparametric estimation of long memory volatility dependencies.     

Type I error rates from likelihood‐based repeated measures analyses of incomplete longitudinal data

The last observation carried forward (LOCF) approach is commonly utilized to handle missing values in the primary analysis of clinical trials. However, recent evidence suggests that likelihood‐based analyses developed under the missing at random (MAR) framework are sensible alternatives. The objective of this study was to assess the Type I error rates from a likelihood‐based MAR approach – mixed‐model repeated measures (MMRM) – compared with LOCF when estimating treatment contrasts for mean change from baseline to endpoint (Δ). Data emulating neuropsychiatric clinical trials were simulated in a 4 × 4 factorial arrangement of scenarios, using four patterns of mean changes over time and four strategies for deleting data to generate subject dropout via an MAR mechanism. In data with no dropout, estimates of Δ and SE_Δ from MMRM and LOCF were identical. In data with dropout, the Type I error rates (averaged across all scenarios) for MMRM and LOCF were 5.49% and 16.76%, respectively. In 11 of the 16 scenarios, the Type I error rate from MMRM was at least 1.00% closer to the expected rate of 5.00% than the corresponding rate from LOCF. In no scenario did LOCF yield a Type I error rate that was at least 1.00% closer to the expected rate than the corresponding rate from MMRM. The average estimate of SE_Δ from MMRM was greater in data with dropout than in complete data, whereas the average estimate of SE_Δ from LOCF was smaller in data with dropout than in complete data, suggesting that standard errors from MMRM better reflected the uncertainty in the data. The results from this investigation support those from previous studies, which found that MMRM provided reasonable control of Type I error even in the presence of MNAR missingness. No universally best approach to analysis of longitudinal data exists. However, likelihood‐based MAR approaches have been shown to perform well in a variety of situations and are a sensible alternative to the LOCF approach. MNAR methods can be used within a sensitivity analysis framework to test the potential presence and impact of MNAR data, thereby assessing robustness of results from an MAR method. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.