James Raymer: “Modelling migration to understand demographic change”

Abstract: Flows of international migration are needed around the world to understand the patterns and corresponding effects on demographic, social and economic change across sending and receiving countries. A major challenge to this understanding is that nearly all of the countries in the world do not gather or produce reliable statistics on flows of international migration. The only information that are widely available represent immigrant population stocks measured at specific points in time – but these represent poor proxies for annual movements. In this talk, I discuss the issues and methodology I have developed for indirectly estimating annual flows of international migration using examples from recent work on Asia-Pacific migration and with the United Nations Population Division to infer age and sex patterns of net international migration.

Bio: James Raymer is a Professor of Demography at the Australian National University. His research focuses on developing innovative methodologies and analytical frameworks to study demographic processes. He is especially interested in studying migration in instances where data are inadequate or missing, and has engaged in many interdisciplinary and international research collaborations on topics ranging from statistical estimation of migration flows to population forecasting. His migration research includes both internal migration (in Australia, England and Wales, Italy, USA) and international migration (among countries in Europe and the Asia Pacific). His current research focuses on developing methods for estimating international migration flows in the Asia Pacific region and small area demographic analyses in Australia. For the past four years, he has been an active participant in the United Nations’ Expert Group on Migration Statistics.