Forecasting the dynamics of the potential of international migrations by 2050

Abstract

The text is an attempt to estimate changes in the potential sources and targets of international migration (countries with a modern population quantity of more than 5 million was taken into account) in accordance with the prognoses of change of population quantity until 2050. The the author attempted to estimate the change in the “difference of potentials of an available population by countries”. The research leans on three scenarios of demographic development as offered by the UN – low, medium and high. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the model created by the author is one of the few models of global international migration based on a synergistic approach. With the help of the created model in the course of consistent iterations, matrices were developed of paired indexes of the mutual attractiveness of countries for migrants for every fifth year from 2020 to 2050. Based on these matrices and in accordance with the UN’s proposed scenarios of demographic development, three scenarios were constructed for forecasting trends and volumes of legal migration for every five years to 2050 among all countries taken into consideration. The predicted values were determined for the total number of international migrants in each of the countries by 2050. The conclusion is that there are stable migration directions which are not limited to the direction of “South-North”. It was also determined that there is no fundamental the difference in the forecasted migration directions according to each of the UN scenarios. The results of the forecasting and some supplementary materials to this article are available online.