Social Protection Issues

The Social Protection team of the Bank has already produced a short policy note on challenges and opportunities of migration for Europe and the neighboring countries in Middle East and North Africa.

In the next Global Economic Prospects on remittances and migration, there will be long-term scenarios (using the Bank global general-equilibrium model) that will highlight key forces driving migration, with a focus on how these forces are likely to change over the next fifteen years.

Several issues will be explored: a) how expected welfare gains may change with increased levels of migration; b) changes in the potential supply of migrants will be modeled in terms of relative changes in real wage levels across countries, although we are not in a position to determine all of the causes of migration ; c) the demand in high-income countries for labor intensive services that are difficult to import (e.g. demand for health care as a result of aging; and d) the implications of migration will be discussed against the background of alternatives to migration.