Self‐Selection in Migration Between Developing Countries: The Role of Unobservable Skills of Gauteng's Migrant Population

The present study investigates the presence of self‐selection among internal and international migrants in Gauteng, South Africa and further disentangles the effects of observed and unobserved characteristics in the self‐selection of migrants by conducting Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition on overall employment and self‐employment outcome variables. Our analysis, based on system‐GMM analysis of pseudo‐panel data, indicates that international migrants experienced markedly higher levels of employment than both locals and internal migrants driven by higher rates of informal and self‐employment. International migrants were also found to outperform their South African‐born counterparts on various variables indicative of well‐being like total household income, per capita household income, higher life satisfaction, and lower debt levels. Even though international migrants did not have higher levels of education, the Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition provided evidence of the positive selection of international migrants to Gauteng, based on unobservable characteristics, to achieve higher levels of employment and self‐employment.     

Immigration,internal migration and crime in South Africa: A multi‐level model analysis

A review of South African literature on crime confirms the lack of a study that considers the impact of migration on the crime rate in the country. The high levels of crime in South Africa aside, additional motivation behind the study has been the increasing rhetoric in media and by politicians insinuating the prominent role of foreign immigrants in the high crime levels of the country. While this is the first attempt to study this relationship in the South African context, it also stands apart from existing studies undertaken in the developed countries by accounting for both internal migrants as well as foreign immigrants. Further, the study claims the use of multi‐level regression estimations as an improvement from the existing studies on the issue by accounting for variance clustering across different spatial levels. In all the estimated models, internal migrant ratio came out as being positively and significantly related to crime rates across five different crime categories, with the sole exception of sexual crime rate. There was no evidence of foreign immigrant ratio impacting on crime rate in any of the crimes analysed except crime relating to property. Further, income inequality and sex ratio figure as determining factors across most types of crime in South Africa.