A Microsimulation Tool for Reconciling Various Measures of Origin-Destination-Specific Migration Flows

Beata Nowok, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)
Frans Willekens, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)

The conceptual and measurement complexity of migration stems from the fact that people move between places in a time-space continuum. The numerous possibilities to discretize temporal dimension of movements lead to diversity of the employed measures of migration flows. They differ not only across countries, but also over time and between sources within the same country. The aim of this paper is to reconcile different operational measures of origin-destination-specific migration flows. We consider both event and transition approach to measuring migration and investigate various time-related constraints (e.g. duration threshold of presence and absence in a country, length of transition interval). Given the availability and quality problems of migration data, the issue is tackled using a continuous-time microsimulation. We generate individual migration histories of persons moving among a closed system of three countries. Different migration measures are derived and compared for the whole virtual population.