Publications (Papers): Papers
Determinants of Regime Survival in Africa
African Journal of Political Science and International Relations
The study applies a survival analytical model to identify institutional features behind observed differences in regime survival among countries of the African region. Of the string of factors under scrutiny, it finds that colonial legacy as well as levels of income to be important determinants of the hazard rates fro regime survival in Africa.
Factors affecting OVC dropping out from school
Zambia
this thesis is an anysis on the Zambian education sector in relation to Orphans and Vulnerable Children and how theya re able to access the education, the research was done in Kitwe district, in Mulenga compund and looks at the main factors that cause school drop outs.
bio
bio notes
Ronaldo Munck is Head of Civic and Global Engagement in the President’s Office at Dublin City University. He has authored or edited more than 20 books on various topics related to globalisation, international development and social movements as well as over 100 academic journal articles. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Turkish Chinese and Japanese. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of international journals including Globalizations, Global Social Policy, Global Labour, Labour History and Latin American Perspectives. Currently Professor Munck is coordinator of the Irish Aid funded inter-university Irish African Partnership for Research Capacity Building (www.irishafricanpartership.ie), co-editor of the inter-university online journal on migration and social transformation in Ireland (www.translocations.ie) and is Visiting Professor of Labour and Migration Studies at the University of Linkøping in Sweden.
Creating and destroying diaspora strategies
International Migration Institute
New Zealand, like many countries, has recently shifted from disparaging emigrants to celebrating expatriates as heroes. What explains this change? The new government initiatives towards expatriates have been attributed to a neoliberal ‘diaspora strategy’, aimed at constructing emigrants and their descendants as part of a community of knowledge-bearing subjects, in order to help the New Zealand economy ‘go global’ (Larner 2007: 80). The research in this paper confirms that the new diaspora initiatives emerged from a process of neoliberal reform. However, it also highlights that, in the same period, older, inherited institutional frameworks for interacting with expatriates were being dismantled as part of a different dynamic within the same wider neoliberalization process. In this way, the research builds on and refines the ‘diaspora strategy’ concept by placing it within a broader analysis of institutional transformation through ‘creative destruction’. At the same time, this study opens up a wider research agenda aimed at revealing, understanding and explaining how states have related to diasporas before and beyond the era of neoliberalism.
Internal and internation migration as a response to double deprivation: some evidence from India
International Migration Institute
This study disentangles the effects of feelings of relative deprivation and the capability of households in realizing their migration aspirations. For this purpose I deconstruct the concept of relative deprivation into intra-group and inter-group relative deprivation and test their relative importance together with levels of absolute deprivation in shaping migration decisions on a household level. The migration decision itself is modelled as a two-stage process which separates the decision on whether to migrate at all, and the decision where to migrate in terms of an internal or international destination. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset referring to the recent 64th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS) in India. This large dataset covers around 125,000 households and about 100,000 former household members counted as out-migrants. I hypothesize that intra-group as well as inter-group relative deprivation influences migration decisions and the choice of destinations. I identify two factors as relevant in this migration decision-making process. First, intra-group as well as inter-group relative deprivations are strong predictors for migration decisions in general, and in terms of possible destinations, for short-distance intra-state movements in particular. The likelihood of out-migration towards international destinations is significantly higher for households with lower levels of intra-group and intergroup relative deprivation. Second, besides the effects of relative deprivation, absolute deprivation plays an ambivalent role: while economically better endowed households have a higher migration propensity to send (primarily male) migrants to distant inter-state and international destinations, the inverse is true for moves of shorter distance that are mainly dominated by (female) migrants stemming from poorer households.
Migration and social fractionalization: double relative deprivation as a behavioural link
International Migration Institute
This study proposes a link between inequality, social fractionalization and the emigration propensity of a population. By assuming that perceptions of relative deprivation may increase migration propensities, I can argue that more fractionalized societies are characterized by lower or higher emigration rates depending on whether social comparisons are made within or across social groups. For intra-group comparisons, the average level of relative deprivation is decreasing with the number of social groups, whereas the opposite is true for inter-group comparisons. Consequently, whether social fractionalization corresponds with higher or lower emigration rates depends on the relative importance of the two concepts, and thus, it is an empirical question. This study finds significantly higher emigration rates for ethnically fractionalized countries, whereas countries with a relatively strong linguistic fractionalization are unequivocally characterized by lower migration propensities.
The role of internal and international relative deprivation in global migration
International Migration Institute
This paper analyses the role of internal (within-country) and international (bilateral and global) relative deprivation and absolute deprivation in international migration. It is argued that these three forms of relative deprivation need to be simultaneously taken into account in order to advance our theoretical understanding of the complex drivers of migration processes. Empirical analysis based on 2000 global migrant stock data suggests that absolute deprivation constrains emigration while international relative deprivation and internal relative deprivation in destination countries fuel migration. The effect of internal relative deprivation in origin countries is small and rather ambiguous. The results highlight complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which relative and absolute deprivation affect migration. The paper suggests that it would be unfounded to expect that decreases in international and internal relative and absolute deprivation will lead to massive reductions in the volume of international migration.
The determinants of international migration: conceptualizing policy, origin and destination effects
International Migration Institute
The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested in the face of their supposed failure to steer immigration and their hypothesized unintended, counter-productive effects. However, due to fundamental methodological and conceptual limitations, evidence has remained inconclusive. While the migration policy research is often descriptive and receiving-country biased, migration determinants research tends to be based on obsolete, theoretically void push-pull and gravity models which tend to omit crucial non-economic, sending-country and policy factors. More fundamentally, this state-of-the-art reveals a still limited understanding of the forces driving migration. Although there is consensus that macro-contextual economic and political factors and meso-level factors such as networks all play ‘some’ role, there is no agreement on their relative weight and mutual interaction. To start filling that gap, this paper outlines the contours of a conceptual framework for generating improved insights into the ways states and policies shape migration processes in their interaction with structural migration determinants in receiving and sending countries. First, it argues that the fragmented insights from different disciplinary theories can be integrated in one framework through conceptualizing virtually all forms of migration as a function of capabilities and aspirations. Second, to increase conceptual clarity it distinguishes the preponderant role of states in migration processes from the hypothetically more marginal role of specific immigration and emigration policies. Subsequently, it hypothesizes four different (spatial, categorical, inter-temporal, reverse flow) ‘substitution effects’ which can partly explain why polices fail to meet their objectives. This framework will serve as a conceptual guide for the DEMIG (The Determinants of International Migration) research project.
Migration transitions - a theoretical and empirical inquiry into the developmental drivers of international migration
International Migration Institute
This paper aims to advance a conceptual framework on the developmental drivers of international migration processes and to provide an empirical test drawing on the global migrant origin database. Conventional ideas that development in origin countries will reduce international migration are ultimately based on “push-pull”, neoclassical and other equilibrium models which assume an inversely proportional relationship between absolute levels and relative differences of wealth and migration. By contrast, another group of theories postulate that development leads to generally increased levels of migration and that societies go through migration transitions characterised by an inverted U-shaped pattern of emigration.
Paradigms, Poverty and Adaptive Pluralism
IDS
Robert Chambers
IDS Working Paper 344