International migration flow data is a messy topic. No single pair of countries defines migration in the same way. Even if the did they most likely measure if differently. This causes some big headaches to anyone who wants to create any inference about migration levels, directions, policy implications or the cause and consequences of people’s movements at a cross national level. During my Ph.D. I worked on methods for estimating comparable international migration flows across multiple European countries.
I identified two fundamental data problems: inconsistency (countries with conflicting reports on the number of people moving between them) of and incompleteness (countries not providing any data). I applied both mathematical and statistical methods to create comparable set of international migration flow estimates. For more details see my Ph.D. dissertation (which is online, see the link below). It contains most of the R/S-Plus code to conduct the estimation in the Appendix. Note, there is also a published paper based on my Ph.D. (abstract and links here). I created a TeX template for the University of Southampton School of Social Sciences here.
Publication Details:
Abel, G. J. (2009). International Migration Flow Table Estimation. University of Southampton, Division of Social Statistics, Doctoral Thesis.
Guy Abel 