Migration and inequality in Africa

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between income inequality and net migration in Africa over the past two decades. Inequality is gauged by the share of income accruing to the top decile of the income distribution. Net migration rates from 54 countries between 2001 and 2021 are matched to inequality, controlling for origin country unemployment, income per capita, as well as foreign direct investment and economic uncertainty in a fixed-effects panel model. Overall, the results suggest that greater inequality is associated with higher migration rates, as opposed to foreign investment and uncertainty, which are found to be negatively associated with net migration. When replicating the experiment for the different regions—East, Middle, North, South and West Africa—, these results hold in all cases except in West Africa, where the coefficients are not found to be statistically significant. Increases in origin country income per capita are also found to be significantly and positively associated with net migration in North and South Africa, as opposed to country-level unemployment which shows a negatively association with net migration rates. As a robustness check, we replicate both analyses using the Gini coefficient as a measure of aggregate income inequality, obtaining very similar results. Overall, the analysis suggests that increasingly unequal distributions of income may lead to a greater number of people coming in than leaving, somehow contributing to the overall level of population growth in African countries. On the other hand, economic uncertainty, foreign direct investment and unemployment tend to have the opposite effect in most African regions.