Modelling regional immigration: using stocks to predict flows

This paper explores the feasibility of improving regional international migration assumptions by analysing the relationship between international migration flows and foreign population structures. Regional projection models are discussed and empirically tested using data for Sweden. The results show that regional assumptions on international migration of foreigners could be improved by using the spatial distribution of stocks of foreigners as predictor. Improvements, however, are only minor and do not seem to compensate for the loss in simplicity of the models. This is especially true at the aggregate level of immigrant groups. Only for relatively new immigrant groups, improvements are substantial.

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