Affiliations: [a] Bureau of Economic and Business Research, 221
Matherly Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-7145, Tel.: 352 392
0171, Ext. 210, Fax: 352 392 4739, E-mail: [email protected]
| [b] Science Applications International Corporation, 1271
Town Center Drive, Building 2, Las Vegas, NV 89134 and Helsinki School of
Economics and Business Administration, L\"{o}nnrotinkatu 5, Mikkeli, Finland,
FIN-50100
Abstract: Net migration has been widely criticized as a theoretical concept and as a
measure of population movement. Many of these criticisms are valid: net
migration reflects a residual rather than a true migration process, it often
masks large gross migration flows, it cannot account for differences in the
characteristics of origin and destination populations, it cannot be used for
rates in a probabilistic sense, and it can lead to misspecified causal models
and unrealistic population projections. However, we believe there are purposes
for which net migration is very useful, especially for analyses of small areas:
1) It provides a summary measure of one component of population change; 2) It
can be used when gross migration data are unavailable or unreliable; and 3) It
provides a low-cost alternative to the use of gross migration data. In this
paper we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of net migration and provide
several examples of how it can be useful for population estimation, forecasting,
and analysis.
Keywords: Applied demography, migration data, net migration, population estimates and projections, small area analysis
