Topics:
Expertise
Migration and development, economic growth, aid effectiveness, economic history
Bio
Michael Clemens is director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he studies the economic effects and causes of migration around the world. He has published on migration, development, economic history, and impact evaluation, in peer-reviewed academic journals including the American Economic Review, and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society Prize. He also serves as a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, and has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and World Development. He is the author of the book The Walls of Nations, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Previously, Clemens has been an Affiliated Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a visiting scholar at New York University, and a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program. He has lived and worked in Colombia, Brazil, and Turkey. He received his PhD from the Department of Economics at Harvard University, specializing in economic development, public finance, and economic history.
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More From Michael Clemens
June 9, 2014
Publication
This paper was updated in March 2015.
Developing countries invest in training skilled workers and can lose part of their investment if those workers emigrate.
June 4, 2014
Blog Post
How does migration affect development? Maybe the most obvious way is the money that migrants send home to poor countries: remittances. But for years, development researchers have faced a puzzle.
June 4, 2014
Publication
More and more countries are recruiting doctors and nurses overseas, unleashing global debates on the proper regulation health worker migration. The World Health Organization (WHO) has advanced a “Global Code of Practice” on health worker recruitment.
May 22, 2014
Blog Post
In a recent study, CGD senior fellow Michael Clemens found that, contrary to popular belief, development in poor countries actually fosters more migration, not less.
May 19, 2014
Publication
While measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We review existing explanations for this puzzle and propose three new ones. First, we offer evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory—arising from changes in measurement, not changes in real financial flows.
May 16, 2014
Blog Post
Migration-and-development has grown into a field of its own, in both research and policy.
May 15, 2014
Publication
Research on migration and development has recently changed, in two ways. First, it has grown sharply in volume, emerging as a proper subfield. Second, while it once embraced principally rural-urban migration and international remittances, migration and development research has broadened to consider a range of international development processes. These include human capital investment, global diaspora networks, circular or temporary migration, and the transfer of technology and cultural norms. We present a selection of frontier migrant-and-development research that instantiates these trends.
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October 14, 2011
Publication
The United States should take modest steps to create a legal channel for limited numbers of people fleeing natural disasters overseas to enter the United States. This would address two related problems: the lack of any systematic U.S. policy to help the growing numbers of people displaced across borders by natural disasters and the inability of U.S. humanitarian relief efforts to reduce systemic poverty or sustainably improve victims’ livelihoods. The aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake presents a compelling case study of the administrative and legislative ways the U.S. government could address both problems. Migration is already a proven and powerful force for reducing Haitians’ poverty. A few modest changes in the U.S. approach could greatly aid Haiti’s recovery.
June 6, 2011
Publication
This policy brief explores the various legal channels through which the U.S. government could leverage the power of migration to help provide disaster relief.
August 6, 2012
Blog Post
A few weeks ago I attended the Migration and Development Conference, which has emerged in the last few years as the l
January 6, 2014
Blog Post
This Sunday is the fourth anniversary of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. It immediately killed more than 150,000 people and the economy was shattered. I’ve been reflecting on the progress Haiti has made and the long road ahead.
October 21, 2011
Blog Post
The Millennium Villages Project, now underway in villages across Africa, is a keystone of United Nations efforts aga
October 20, 2017
Blog Post
The Global Compact on Migration (GCM) is an opportunity for all of us to make history. I join as an economist with the many other government, humanitarian, development, and international actors mobilized behind the GCM because I wish for the Compact to rise to that occasion. To do that, it must propose new mechanisms for substantial, additional, lawful, economic labor mobility.
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